Gabino Iglesias Talks Building a Horror Mythos In House of Bone and Rain
Two years ago this month, author Gabino Iglesias released his breakthrough novel, The Devil Takes You Home. A dizzying blend of crime fiction and horror that Iglesias himself terms “barrio noir,” the book went on to win both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards for Best Novel, firmly establishing Iglesias as one of the most important genre voices on the modern horror scene. Now, Iglesias returns with House of Bone and Rain, a revenge story wrapped in a supernatural mystery set in his homeland of Puerto Rico.
As a hurricane rips through the island, devastating its inhabitants and stirring up old secrets, the book follows five friends who set out to right a few wrongs, even if it means taking on forces bigger than any of them can even conceive. It arrives as one of the most anticipated horror novels of the year, and even with the long shadow of The Devil Takes You Home in mind, it more than lives up to the hype.
Ahead of House of Bone and Rain‘s release, Paste sat down with Iglesias to discuss the book’s origins, how he built his own supernatural mythos in his native Puerto Rico, and much more.
(This interview has been edited and condensed for content and clarity.)
Paste Magazine: You’ve mentioned that this story began for you back in Puerto Rico in 1999. What did House of Bone and Rain look like back then, and why was now the right time to dive back into it?
Gabino Iglesias: It was not good [in 1999]. It was a basic story. I was like, “Well, this happened to us and I really wish we had done something more.” We didn’t, we’re not badasses in a Quentin Tarantino movie, but what if we’d gone ahead and found some information? What if we’d actually pursued this thing? Back then, it was just a crime fiction narrative about young men going out and very stupidly getting into a lot of trouble and finding revenge. And I didn’t know how to make that happen. It’s a cool idea, but I didn’t think I had the chops.
You have to juggle a bunch of characters, and it was the second novel that I was going to set at home [in Puerto Rico]. I knew that there was going to be some politics that I was going to talk about colonialism and the state of the country. So for basically two decades, I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It was too daunting of a task. The success of The Devil Takes You Home made me think maybe this is the time, I can try to do this now. I think I’ve learned a thing or two by reading and writing for the past 20 years. So maybe now’s the time. And that core, the seed remained the same. It was five dudes going out to get revenge. And yeah, it was a lot of fun to write. Finally, to get it out felt like surgery, to take that thing out after so many years.
Paste: So if it started as a crime novel, when did the supernatural horror part start to come out for you?
Iglesias: It’s a very natural process. I’m a pantser, but I do have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then I know that sometimes the elements that are going to be the elements of cohesion, they come to me, and I’m like, “I’m going to run with that.” In this case, I knew there was going to be a hurricane. I knew I wanted to talk about the deplorable state of our grid, and the fact that the government is corrupt. My parents are still back on the island. They haven’t had a Monday through Sunday of power since [Hurricane] Maria happened. And they’re not alone. That’s on a national level. It’s still a catastrophe.
So I knew I wanted to talk about that, but it’s such a powerful thing. It’s so packed with fear and grief after, that I knew it was going to be a bigger character. So I started looking for ways of using that supernatural angle that I enjoy so much, which is the powerful thing that calls to me from horror fiction. And in the process of not writing this novel, but learning stuff, I learned that a hurricane is basically a word that we use that comes from the Taino word, hurakán, which was the bad, the evil God, the angry God that destroyed everything. And I was like, “What if I can take this a step further and then make this an entirely new mythology?” And I knew I wanted to play with some Lovecraftian elements. Those were already there, but then I had to bring my own to make it interesting. And the hurricane was the way to go, the way to make everything darker and a little bit scarier, a little bit more dangerous.
So I sit there and I think about it until it coalesces into something that might make sense if I try to write it, and then I just go for it. So I let it happen. I think every book has its own thing. With this one, it was just, “It’s time to take one step forward and make my own thing.” Every big name in horror that I admire has the mythos. You can talk about the Brian Keane mythos the Josh Malerman mythos, and the Paul Tremblay mythos. So it felt like it was time, and that was my way of doing it.
Paste: You’ve talked about Mario in The Devil Takes You Home and how he became more like you as the book went on. Now, in House of Bone and Rain, your narrator is Gabe, who’s a Puerto Rican kid with glasses who lifts weights. With those similarities in mind, how autobiographical is Gabe as a character?
Iglesias: With Mario, it was almost like an accident. I had 30,000 or 35,000 words of The Devil Takes You Home written, and I had three jobs, and life was stable, so Mario was his own character. And then the pandemic rolled around, and I lost two out of my three jobs, including my job as a high school teacher. So, suddenly I was unemployed, broke, and didn’t know what to do—no one knew what to do. We were all desperate during the pandemic. No vaccine at the beginning, and no clue what the hell was going on. That influenced my critique of the healthcare system [in that book]. This one was not a critique of the healthcare system, so it’s based on something that me and my friends went through.
And one of the things that I wanted to talk about is, I wanted to play in that gray area where toxic masculinity hides something beautiful. These are all dumb ass kids doing really dumb ass shit, but they also have this love for each other. They take that whole ride-or-die thing very seriously. When you’re in your thirties and forties, you don’t make friendships like that anymore. It’s like that one point in time in your life when you’re a kid, you’re growing up, and you find kindred souls. And then you’re like, “Yeah, I would go get punched in the face for you. You call me up, I’ll help you hide a body.”
The process of writing those first couple of chapters, it was like, “This dude sounds so much like me because most of these feelings, I’m just revisiting.” It just made sense to just accept it, and roll with it. If I could put myself in that book, then most of the fear and the grief and the trying to protect your friends and all that stuff, it was going to be easier to write than if I had to do some esoteric exercises to get into the mind of a character. I’m a dude just writing about his buddies from back in the day. And that made it easier to flow with all those slightly demanding emotional scenes that are in that book.
Paste Magazine: You’ve said that you invented a lot of the mythology present in the book, and at the same time you’re dealing with lots of established magical and religious traditions that are already present in Puerto Rico. How did you go about bringing that all together into one story?
Iglesias: When it comes to writing that type of stuff, it’s not that hard because I think Puerto Rico stands at the center of the world in terms of mixing and matching religions and having a very rich cultural heritage of whatever the Spaniards brought, whatever the Tainos had, whatever came to us from Africa. And after spending my first 25 years back home, I was like, “This is always going to be part of my books. I want syncretism in my books.”
And [I was] writing about how it happens back home, and how people pinch from here and grab a little bit from here. It’s like, “As long as you’re going downhill, every saint helps. So you pray to all of them.” Whatever your grandma tells you is true, has to be true, because whatever my grandma tells me, it’s true. It’s just going back and remembering having neighbors who were into Santeria or Palo Mayombe or Voodoo or Mesa Blanca.
So for me, it’s just going back. My grandma had her little room for the spirits. The bathroom in the hallway was where the spirits lived, and she had her candles. You weren’t supposed to use that bathroom. So it is very easy for me to reach back and touch that, remember it, and bring it into the books.
Paste: I hope this is not a spoiler, but the “House of Bone and Rain” in the title is actually Puerto Rico itself. What were you hoping to impart with that description, and what did you want to say about the island that you hope readers take away from this book?
Iglesias: I didn’t know the word before I moved to the US and tackled my PhD studies at UT Austin. But once I learned the word, I’m like, “I’ve been thinking about this thing my entire life.” A psychogeography.
I knew this didn’t have to be a book where Puerto Rico was a stage. It had to be a book where Puerto Rico was the beating heart of the [story]. It had to be the people. It had to be the friendships, it had to be the places, it had to be the presence, the continuous presence of the ocean, and the knowledge that it’s a hundred miles long by 35 miles wide. You’re not running away from anything. It’s too tiny for you to run away anywhere unless you have money to fly away to the States.
I knew it had to be more than a character. It had to be a place that [the characters] think about, a place that shaped them in many ways, a place that, in the case of Gabe, he just doesn’t want to leave. “It’s broken, but it’s my thing. It’s broken, but it’s still my house. I want to stay in my house. I feel comfortable here.” So I knew Puerto Rico had to be at the core of everyone and everything in this for it to work.
Paste: You have a really vivid way of writing violence. How do you approach it? Is it something that you feel, or is it something that’s just fun to choreograph?
Iglesias: I don’t know if I should say luckily or unluckily, but I’ve been around violence. And so, for me to appreciate violence, to enjoy it, it has to be in movie form because I think the visual aspect of it, if you tried to write down, as one chapter, a fight in a movie by Jet Li, two paragraphs, and you’re already bored. Now, on screen, you will watch John Wick fight for four or five minutes nonstop, and it is amazing. It’s the best shit ever. Now, if you wrote the John Wick novel, how many shots, how many scenes of gun-fu can you really get away with?
So when I write fiction, and things get violent, I want people to see it, but I also want it to feel real. It is going to be quick and painful and bloody and all that stuff, but then it’s over. I’ve been in a lot of fights. It usually goes: It starts, 30, 60 seconds after that, it’s over. Someone’s on the floor or someone’s too winded to continue. So it’s not this awesome choreography of violence where you’re like, “I’m enjoying the movie. I know what’s happening. I enjoy it as an art form.” In my novels, it’s like, “No, tire iron to the face. It’s quick, it’s painful. I’m not going to linger on it.”
I know for slashers and for a lot of horror, especially hardcore horror, you need that stuff. In crime, you don’t need it. You can write your way around it, but I want you to look at it. I want it to hurt me as I’m writing it, and I want it to hurt you [when you read it] because that’s the only way it feels real. I want you to feel like when you’re reading this stuff, it could happen to anybody. Anybody can be shot, anybody can be stabbed. It should feel real.
Paste Magazine: In addition to writing fiction, you’re still a working critic, a lecturer, and a kind of evangelist for the horror genre in general. What does doing that kind of work give you that then feeds back into your books?
Iglesias: It’s going to take me about a year to finish a book. Knowing how publishing works, that means that maybe one year after that, if we’re lucky, you’ll see that book, which means two years between books.
In those two years, I’ll probably read anywhere between 300 and 450 books. I come at this thing as a fan of literature, first and foremost. Yes, I’m going to sit down to write. I’m going to try to make it my own thing. I’m going to try to keep Barrio Noir as pure as possible. I’m going to try to be as unique as I can and use my own voice. And then that writing time is over. And so it’s like, “I gotta read. I have to read these books, and if I can, find an opportunity to talk about them, which is the best thing about writing for the New York Times. Every month I get to talk about three or four books. And if they’re good, usually, I’ll gush about them, and then it makes a difference. So it’s like the bigger the spotlight you get, the bigger the spotlight you have to shine on others.
Yeah, Release Week, please, let’s just make it all about me. Let’s make sure that I can get a new contract and do this with two more books with Mulholland. The rest of the time, what is it? A new short story that you wrote? Let’s celebrate that. Someone has a new memoir out, let’s celebrate that. You write some poetry, send it my way. I’m still reviewing for NPR. I’m still reviewing for Locus Magazine. I’m obviously doing the New York Times thing. I’m constantly pitching the Boston Globe. I want to talk about books. I want to shine that light on as many writers as possible. And we need it. We need it, man. I discover books that way, whether it’s Twitter or someone sharing a review, I’m like, “Oh, this is too violent or too gay or too political? I need to read that shit.” So I believe in reviews. I gotta do them constantly.
Paste: With that in mind, who are some horror authors you think more people should be reading right now?
Iglesias: Oh, that list is very long. Thankfully, I think some of them are starting to get that love. I’m going to start with Hailey Piper, Cynthia Pelayo, Eric LaRocca. Obviously, new superstar, V Castro, deserves all the love in the world. [There’s a debut novel by] Kailee Pedersen, Sacrificial Animals, one of the most outstanding debuts I’ve read this year. And I just read The Deading by Nicholas Belardes, which is also absolutely mind-blowing. And then there’s a Spanish writer called Layla Martinez. She has a novella that was translated this year called Woodworm.
Paste: Without giving anything away, there’s room at the end of this book for more stories, and you’ve talked about wanting to build a mythos for yourself. Do you see returning to this version of Puerto Rico for more stories?
Iglesias: I don’t want to be mysterious or anything but I don’t know. A lot of people have asked me about doing sequels. And my first thought is always, “Oh, I have, in my head, half a sequel for The Devil Takes You Home.” And everybody goes like, “No, you can’t. You killed him.” I’m like, “No. He got shot, and he looks up, ready to look into the eyes of God. That’s all I said. If you killed him, that’s on you. He’s still alive.”
With this book, it’s the same thing. I know there are things from this book that do show up in the book that I’m writing now. About a year, year and a half ago when I had a story in Austin Noir, someone wrote me an email saying, “Hey, I’ve read a bunch of your stories in all your books, and this is the third time you mentioned the Pink Monkey,” which is a very old, very, very bad place where women danced to entertain gentlemen. And that strip club closed down maybe 12 years ago. But I went there when I worked for the Austin Post and I had some experiences there.
So it became like, if I have to do a strip joint, that’s the one that I will put in my books. So every single book since Zero Saints shares the same universe. I like to do little winks here and there to my readers who’ve read everything. So I’ll do things like, there’s a mention, not by name necessarily, but there is a mention of the horror film Event Horizon in every single one of my books. Little things like that make it even more fun in the long run.
So will I return to Puerto Rico? Probably. Will it be the same characters? I don’t think so, but I’m not ruling it out because who knows, right? If the editor loved it and it performs well and he’s like, “Can we go back?” I’m like, “Hell yeah, we can go back.”
House of Bone and Rain is available now wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.