The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
Oh boy…how do I begin this…
Ok. First things first, “The Devil Takes You Home” is an award winning novel. It’s described as a genre bender where supernatural horror meets crime drama and it does technically do that but I don’t understand the hype. The book itself is incredibly well written. There were many moments in this book where I felt genuine horror and gross because the author did such a good job placing me directly in the path of the monsters on the pages.
That is where the problem lies.
I was expecting monsters. Boogeymen that when I closed the book, I got to say “wow good thing that’s not real,” and then move on. That is not what I got. The book depicts our main character starting as a respectable man who loses his daughter and turns him into a worse and worse person. Sure, there are monsters in this book that I can leave to the side, but the worst monsters were the ones that didn’t have supernatural powers. The worst monsters were the people exploiting helpless people into making them money.
There is a scene in this book of a kid getting his toe cut off that makes me queasy thinking about it now. There wasn’t anything supernatural about the horror in that scene. It was just a bad person doing something horrible to a helpless child.
Positive reviews of this book talk about how “real” the book is. I don’t think real is the right word. This book is gory, torture porn. It’s a book that has every opportunity to turn itself around and be a beacon of hope, but then squashes it every step of the way. Maybe that’s the point.
I’m not a fan of that point.
When it comes to rating this book, it’s hard. I didn’t like this book, I don’t think it’s worth anyone’s time, but it is well written and maybe it’s just not a genre for me. That being said, I have to be honest. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anybody and my rating will show that.
2.75 out of 5 stars.
