The Devil Takes You Home

A Novel

By: Gabino Iglesias

Narrated by: Jean-Marc Berne

From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what's left of his family—even if it means a descent into violence.

Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.

The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

©2022 Gabino Iglesias (P)2022 Mulholland Books

Critic reviews

One of Harper’s Bazaar's Best, Buzziest New Books of 2022

One of Crimereads 16 Horror Novels to Look Out for This Year

"Pure noir, overflowing with the rage and sorrow of our times, The Devil Takes You Home is brutal, hallucinatory, and somehow, beautiful. This novel confirms what some of us already knew: Gabino Iglesias is a fierce, vital voice." (Paul Tremblay, best-selling author of Survivor Song)

"Some nightmares you wake from just leave you in an even worse nightmare. And then Gabino Iglesias holds his hand out from that darkness, takes you home." (Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians)

"An intoxicating story of a man in desperate financial straits who turns himself into a hitman and accepts a highly dangerous contract on a cartel transport operation. The job takes him and two others across Texas and further into an abyss of violence, existential dread, and paranormal happenings” (Crimereads)

Great book

Loved it . Awesome narrator, storyline and characters. Kept me hooked the entire time and I’ll look for more from this author

thriller with a dash of the occult

This was a slow burn thriller. we start off with a lot of emotional trauma experiencing the death of our MCS little girl, and the the solution of his marriage. through the grief a finds purpose in violence. that violence leads to a heist that is supposed to be the last till ever need to do. it also happens to me full of twists and surprises that You Don't see coming. getting through Mario's grief and dealing with his depressive thoughts dragged at times, but once the heist begins you won't believe how quick the action and the intensity ramp up. I really enjoyed this book and after reading the final twist at the end I kept coming back to think about all these little things throughout the book that I missed before that could have led me to knowing what was going on. really enjoyable really spooky.

Brilliant Beautiful and Horrifying

Gabino Iglesias tell a story through the main character that we don’t often see, or I should say, don’t want to see. This story is intense, grotesque, beautiful, and disturbing in the way it takes the reader inside two different worlds. One world is easy to disguise as being “just fine”, the other a world is a deep dive into Hell. There are very disturbing supernatural elements to this story and some magical realism making Iglesias is on his way to becoming the literary Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. The usage of Spanish throughout the story lends to an authentic quality and is emblematic of the story if you don’t speak Spanish. I highly recommend this story to anyone, although a warning, you must be up to it and prepared for Odyssey like no other.

Every great hero dies.

The very rare great book. What more does one have to say. Obviously three more words.

Gruesome and timely

Monsters are everywhere. Through hard-hitting twists and turns that grab our hearts and minds along the way, we lose ourselves in a tale of grief and the grind of life in a messed-up world full of toxicity. I only understood whatever Spanish I remembered from HS but liked those interjections, which added to the whole atmosphere of the story by immersing us in the world. Mario is relatable as he narrates us through his darkness. Cool story, well told! Thank you for this book!

It’s ok.

If you don’t understand Spanish don’t listen. It was ok and a bit surprising here and there but I didn’t like where it went. Seems like character set up for the next book without giving the reader a rounded experience in this one.

Five stars for sheer emotional gravitas.

The frightening thing here is not how horrifying the world we live in is but that I think you were holding back. Without the paranormal aspects to twist reality a few degrees, I would not have stopped crying.
I cry a lot so that's not really too strange.

The story is as gorgeous as it is heartbreaking and the narration brings the foreign elements home to roost.

Although I needed a pint of ice cream when I finished this I wouldn't have traded a minute.

Great story

Great story, realistic references and some twists and turns would definitely read again. Thank you!

Genre defying

Genre-defying novels are my new favorite thing. I tend to like crime novels, creepy horror novels, and also political and social commentary novels, so when I read reviews of The Devil Takes You Home that described this book as having all of the above, I knew I wanted to read it.

Overall I liked the writing style and the very creative plot. I even had sympathy for the main character, even though he was a fairly horrible person. Some parts had a dark humor that made me chuckle and one part caused me to have a nightmare.

My least favorite sections of the book were the repetitive inner monologues that the main character has as he obsessively rehashes his predicament and rationalizes his decisions. It’s never enjoyable to listen to someone perseverate for hours, not in real life and not in a novel.

I think anyone who likes horror would enjoy reading this book. Even though large portions of it don’t have horror scenes and are not very scary, the parts that are terrifying are really intense and incredibly well written. If gore and graphic violence bothers you in a book, you might not want to read this one.

About a third of the book is in Spanish but I was able to understand it from context even though I don’t speak Spanish. I like the use of language to convey the feeling of being there with the characters as they speak to each other. They obviously are going to talk Spanish to each other and it would have felt unrealistic to have them speaking English.

I’m interested to read more by this author since he seems to have a lot of excellent and unique ideas.

Listen to this story, it's impressive

I really loved the book, it made me go through a lot of human feelings: anger, fear, terror, doubt, sadness, helplessness, empathy and apathy. The pure evil in human beings, the true terror in everyone, things so damn you wish they wouldn't look like real life. I can say that you will enjoy this book very much, but you will enjoy it if you are bilingual, since the Spanish parts have a touch of Mexico, I still recommend them. Finally, it also deals with issues such as racism, inequality and lack of opportunities. if you are a gringo read it and try to understand the context of some people who lack opportunities.