AUSTIN, Tex. – At the start of the pandemic, Gabino Iglesias had been living paycheck to paycheck in Texas for over a decade. Then the public high school where he taught had devastating news: he was let go.
Iglesias, a Puerto Rican novelist, was without a salary or health insurance. Unable to find another job in the bleak 2020 job market, he bet on finishing the book he’d started writing during his lunch breaks.
As Covid-19 raged outside, he wrote at a feverish pace for months on “The Devil Takes You Home,” his haunting noir thriller, which Mulholland Books will publish Tuesday. Echoing the book of Job, it follows a father in Austin who loses his job and health insurance, his young daughter to a terrible illness and, finally, his marriage.
Desperate, the narrator, Mario, accepts an offer from a meth-addicted friend and embarks on a new job as a cartel hit man. This shift leads to a borderland odyssey that combines noir and magical realism, meditations on religiosity and human cruelty, and social commentary on guns, the drug trade and resurgent racism.
“I’ve poured all my anger at the health care system into this book,” says Iglesias, 40, the author of “Zero Saints” and “Coyote Songs,” two novels that have been critically acclaimed and enthusiastically received, albeit by a relatively small number. readers.
By contrast, the arrival of Iglesias’ new book, with acclaim from noir masters, a book tour in the works and film rights already an option, represents a breakthrough moment for a writer who has long toiled to make ends meet.
As the American healthcare system continues to confuse and inflame, Iglesias taps into a well-known source of fear. The book has parallels to “Breaking Bad,” the series about a cancer-stricken high school teacher who descends into the meth underworld to secure the future of his family.
But unlike “Breaking Bad,” which received critical acclaim but criticized the inconclusive way some Latino characters were portrayed, “The Devil Takes You Home” enjoys the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the American West.
Some characters speak only English, baffled by the Spanglish that rules much of the border. Others prefer the Spanish of the streets of Ciudad Juárez; grief-stricken Mario effortlessly switches between English, Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, and variations of Mexican Spanish.
While there are plenty of contextual hints of meaning, most of the book’s non-English dialogue is untranslated and unvarnished, a reflection of how millions of people actually talk in Texas, be it in downtown El Paso or the rougher parts. from Austin.
“I made it clear that we don’t use italics,” Iglesias said during an interview in Spanglish at a bustling Austin cafe, emphasizing his sense of relief when his editor at Mulholland, a print of Little, Brown, sided with him. chose.
Growing up as a writer navigating languages and cultures was not always something for Iglesias. He grew up speaking only Spanish in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island that is a territory of the United States (like many Puerto Ricans, Iglesias often prefers the word “colony”).
As a young reader, he was drawn to authors like Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, part of what he called a self-feeding “very stable diet of horror.” He said he learned English in part by reading HP Lovecraft, the dictionary in hand, and looking up words he didn’t know.
In Puerto Rico, he was accepted into a marine biology program in college and then transferred to earn a business degree while working in construction to pay the bills. Realizing that the business world wasn’t for him, he “wasted two years on law school,” began dabbling in journalism, and was accepted into a postgraduate journalism program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Iglesias arrived in Texas with $236 to his name and went two years without a car. He struggled to make ends meet on a stipend of about $930 a month, taught radio reporting to college students, sold life insurance, and taught English as a second language to Spanish-speaking immigrants.
That last experience, in addition to broadening his knowledge of Spanish from Mexico and other countries in the Americas, reminded him of some of the advantages he had. Like his students, many of whom had crossed the border illegally from Mexico, he had followed his star to Texas.
But unlike them, Iglesias noted, he didn’t have to worry about immigration agents knocking on his door and expelling him at a time of resurgent xenophobia in the United States.
“Puerto Ricans may be second-class citizens, but that U.S. passport is extremely useful,” he said. (Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, but islanders cannot vote in presidential elections and do not have voting representation in Congress.)
Still, Iglesias said he was often asked about his immigration status when looking for work, and as he sought one low-paid office job after another, he was often greeted with indifference or skepticism by potential employers.
“My education and my resume don’t go hand in hand with how I look,” he said. “If you’re a stocky brown guy with an accent, not many people are screaming to give you a shot.”
Even after earning a Ph.D. in journalism, Iglesias said he still had dreams outside of academia. More than once, while continuing to write his own, he said colleagues suggested it would be a good marketing decision to change his name to “something with fewer vowels in it.”
Then there are the many sacrifices that newly minted scholars make to secure steady jobs. He watched contemporaries move across the country from one university campus to another, delivering ultra-specialized work aimed at polishing their qualifications as professors.
“I didn’t want to spend my whole life writing articles for magazines that no one is going to read,” he said.
So he focused on his writing while also performing various gigs such as producing book reviews, grading papers and teaching writing classes online, to pay the bills.
It was enough, he said, to keep a roof over his family, which includes his 9-year-old son, his wife and a rescue pit bull. They still live in low-income housing in Austin, even though Iglesias is finally finding wider recognition.
The results of his dedication to his craft are not for the faint of heart. He cited Appalachian noir practitioners such as David Joy and SA Cosby as influences, saying the goal of his work was to “bring it down the gutter.”
Some scenes in “The Devil Takes You Home” graphically explore how religious fervor can justify just about any course of action. In other areas, he explores the blood-soaked hypocrisy of border security policies that allow arms smuggling from the United States to fuel Mexico’s drug trade.
Then there are the eerie scenes in the smuggling tunnels below the border, where the… criaturas life, or the sense of surprise in the presence of an exceptionally brutal drug lord who speaks with the eloquence of a theologian.
“Being in the presence of monsters is okay, as long as you don’t think too much about what they’re capable of,” Mario says. “The scarier thing is when you realize what you’re capable of on your own.”