House of Bones and Rain Gabino Iglesias’s Love Song to Puerto Rico (Little, Brown & Company, 2024) has been described as a “love song” to the author’s native Puerto Rico. Christopher Boren (New York Times Book Review) writes, “The book captures in startlingly vivid detail not only the devastation of a hurricane that killed thousands but also the daily life of a vulnerable community. … Iglesias’s stark, dignified and sometimes stunningly beautiful portrayal of the grittiness and pessimism of urban Puerto Rico is striking in his prose.”
The Fiction Center“The novel is a love song (a heartbreaking one, of course) to Iglesias’ native Puerto Rico, where a group of young people seek justice for the murder of their friend’s mother. ‘Of course… what we knew could have been a pebble at the bottom of a pile of everything we loved, and it’s possible that at least half of that pebble was bullshit.’ Inspired by Stephen King, Iglesias combines elements of violent cinematic crime thrillers with horror and a bit of mystical magic. The result is a striking, powerful ode to a place and a people facing threats from all sides.”
explanation: This “amazingly intuitive” (New York Times Book Review)’s novel, in which a group of young men seek revenge after one of their mothers is murdered in the slums of Puerto Rico, Stand by Me has a heart as dark as haunted obsidian.
For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Thabo, Paul and Bimbo, death was always close at hand: hurricanes. car accidents. gang violence. suicide. We take a fantastic journey Gabe’s grandma keeps repeating that we are surrounded by ghosts, but this time it’s different: Bimbo’s mom has been shot and killed. I’m going to kill those who killed her. Bimbo swears, and everyone agrees.
Mad with grief, Bimbo loses track of who it is and searches around for names, refusing to catch them. They soon learn that Maria was shot dead by men working for a Puerto Rican drug lord. No one has stood up to him and survived. As the boys plan their strategy, a storm approaches far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits on their currents and wash ashore, where the evil spirits impose their own order.
Blurring the lines between myth, mysticism, and the harsh realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming-of-age story and a fatalistic tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what comes crashing down on us in waves.
Gabino Iglesias He is the author of Shirley Jackson Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning novels. The devil will take you homeand the author of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels. Zero Saints and Coyote SongHe is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, Texas. New York Times Book ReviewFor more information, https://bookstore.centerforfiction.org/item/Bookstorea
