CBR18 Bingo – Left: A sinister story about what’s left after violence.
House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias is a novel-length version of the ‘dig two graves before getting revenge’ saying. Or the one about how eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Or any other comparable adage, which I’m sure exists. There can’t just be two ways of saying that revenge is not worth it.
The book is mostly narrated by Gabe. Gabe and his friends are like brothers. They’re very different, but they stick together and protect each other. There’s the gay one, the smart one, the one called Bimbo (like the bread), etc. The boys are compared to kids from a Stephen King novel a few times, only these suffer under colonialism in Puerto Rico.
María is Bimbo’s mother. She’s great and they all love her the way they all love each other’s families. Then she’s murdered when the boys get close enough to adulthood to see it.
Bimbo snaps.
He vows revenge, taking the group against Papalote, Puerto Rico’s El Chapo or Pablo Escobar, etc. This is very stupid and the mortal repercussions are immediate.
We’re told Bimbo wasn’t always like this, but you need to trust Gabe that Bimbo is worth the chaos and horrors he’s causing. And I did trust Gabe’s narration, even as I (and he) saw how unreliable and naive he was about his friends.
This is a supernatural horror, with sea monsters, witches, and magic. But they have nothing on the very natural horrors the boys live in. Wherever it came from, Hurricane María nurtures all the violence and chaos that fills the story. Because that’s when and where this takes place.
I could feel the storm coming as I read, and then the despair after it hit. It’s a dark book, sometimes bordering on being dark for the sake of being dark. But Iglesias makes it work.
