For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang violence. Suicide. Estamos rodeados de fantasmas was Gabe’s grandmother’s refrain. We are surrounded by ghosts. But this time is different. Bimbo’s mom has been shot dead. We’re gonna kill the guys who killed her Bimbo swears. And they all agree.
Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. Soon, they learn Maria was gunned down by guys working for the drug kingpin of Puerto Rico. No one has ever gone up against him and survived. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order.
Blurring the boundaries between myth, mysticism, and the grim realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming of age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.
Certainly I’ve talked here before about how much I LOVE books & movies & shows that sit right on the edge of horror and crime fiction. There’s a lot of genre-blending that happens these days & I’m all for it, but I think stories that combine elements of horror and crime/mystery will always be among my favorites!
I got a taste of that with Gabino Iglesias’s previous novel, THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME, but goddamn…the lines between crime fiction and horror are not just blurred in his latest novel, HOUSE OF BONE AND RAIN. Those lines are beaten to a bloody pulp and fucking disappeared.
Additionally, as if this book wasn’t great enough (it’s really great), you could also file this under coming-of-age horror too. Oof. I’ll try to put together a coherent review for this book, but I will say up front: this is one of the darkest and most violent books I’ve ever read. I would absolutely recommend checking the content warnings for this one on Storygraph, because yeah…this book goes to some profoundly dark places.
The book is set in Puerto Rico amidst a looming hurricane. The story is simple: revenge. The way it unfolds is…decidedly not simple. Our core group of characters are all boys in their late teens, recently graduated from high school. Gabe, Bimbo (a nickname), Xavier, Tavo, and Paul are close like brothers. We get bits and pieces of how they all met & came to be friends, but we know from the outset that this is a tight-knit group of friends.
Early in the book (like on the first page), we learn that Bimbo’s mother was shot and killed outside a nightclub where she worked. Bimbo believes his mother to be a small/part-time drug dealer, selling a little weed here and there. The truth of her life & her ambitions are much more complex, and are part of the overall mystery of the story.
But from the word go, we see the grief and the rage over his mother’s murder begin to tear Bimbo apart. He is absolutely single-minded in his purpose, to get revenge against the people responsible for her death. With varying degrees of success/enthusiasm for the bloody tasks ahead of them, Bimbo turns to his friends for help.
And so begins a series of mind-blowingly disturbing and bloody nights, all while the island is absolutely ravaged by a brutal hurricane.
Yeah, wow. This is just an explosive read, the very definition of a page turner. The book takes some turns that I definitely didn’t see coming, and while trying to be mindful of spoilers…just prepare to get a little weird with this one.
So much attention is given to the location of this story, and the way it feels to be in this climate during and after such a catastrophic storm. The humidity starts to seep into your pores as you read. Iglesias fills the pages with so much horror, both human and supernatural…it’s both difficult to look at and impossible to look away. The brotherhood between these five boys is really the heart & soul of this novel, but none of them will escape unscathed.
HOUSE OF BONE AND RAIN really pushed me into some uncomfortable places, and again…this one is dark, dark, dark. This is just the second Gabino Iglesias novel I’ve read but I’m a huge fan & can’t wait to see what he gets up to next.
Grimdark Dad 