Up First from NPR - A Haunted Revenge with Gabino Iglesias

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

By the time he was in middle school, writer Gabino Iglesias gravitated toward stories that unsettled him. Stories that scared him enough that he needed to turn on a light. Now a Bram Stoker Award-winning author, Iglesias writes this type of fiction himself. Today on The Sunday Story, Iglesias talks to host Ayesha Rascoe about his new novel, House of Bone and Rain, which centers on a group of friends determined to avenge a murder. Iglesias describes how he uses supernatural elements to make a story more powerful, the redeeming parts of toxic masculinity, and the beauty and perils of unwavering loyalty.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Myesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. It's Labor Day weekend. Where did this summer go? It has just zoomed by. But it's not too late for one last summer read. Now, as I've said before, I love horror. And as I've also said before, I can't get enough of it. I recently read a novel that fed my love for horror stories, so indulge me in an episode about a really good horror thriller book.

It's set in Puerto Rico, and it's about a group of close male friends who are dancing with death. The novel is House of Bone and Rain. It's the latest book by the Brom Stoker Award winner Gabino Iglesias. The story is built around a murder. The mother of one man in the group of friends is killed. Afterward, the friends decide to plot revenge. And what I really loved about the book is that it explores how the connections that we make, the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the friendships, they can be a force for good. But at times they can play on our worst impulses. And it really explores how seeking vengeance can sometimes eat away at us in ways that we never even imagine.

Today on The Sunday Story, a conversation with author Gabino Iglesias. Stay with us. Do you feel like there's more on your to-do list than you can accomplish? Or maybe the world's problems feel extra heavy these days. We can't eliminate stress, but we can manage it. It's almost like I have a new operating system now. Like I tend to live more in this light. Stress Less, a quest to reclaim your calm. A new series from NPR's Life Kit.

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More at kresge.org. Welcome back to the Sunday Story. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and I'm joined by Gabino Iglesias, the author of the new novel, House of Bone and Rain. Thank you so very much for having me, Aisha. I want us to start the way you kind of start the book with the reader thrown right into the action. It starts with our awkward silence seemed to give him

a resounding yes. And he placed his gun on top of his dead mother's chest. When he looked at us again, his eyes were bloodshot, his dark face streaked with tears. He used both hands to wipe his cheeks

before reaching to the casket again and placed his right hand on top of the gun. Blot Shot, his dark face streaked with tears. He used both hands to wipe his cheeks before reaching into the casket again and placed his right hand on top of the gun. We were all watching him, wondering what weird ritual we were witnessing, being a part of. Bimbo kept his eyes glued to his mother but moved his head sideways. He wanted us to put our hands on top of his. When you spend enough time with someone, you can more or less read their mind. We all took a step or two forward, reaching to Maria's dark brown casket with lacy white interior and placed our hands on the gun, resting on her chest. Then we stood there, huddled over Maria's body, shoulder to shoulder like the brothers we were. Now, that sets a scene. But tell us what's just happened here. job checking IDs outside a club. So these young men got together and decided to seek vengeance,

to right the wrong that was done in the universe by avenging this dead woman. And you get right into it. That's what I kind of really enjoyed about it. You didn't waste no time. You have things to do. Yes. But this novel follows five friends, Bimbo, Tavo, Xavier, Paul, and Gabe. And Gabe is really the main character. But it's Bimbo's mother who died. And they all consider themselves brothers. And really their identities are shaped by this connection. What I found so fascinating about the book is that it shows like how the group dynamic can be so powerful and empowering in a wonderful way,

but it also can lead to very dangerous and questionable choices. Like that brotherhood they have, it's both like this safety net for them, but it's a blind kind of love. Like I will, what we call nowadays the ride or die. There's no reason to die. You don't have to do those things. You can do some other things if you think it through. But I think a lot of young men don't think things through. So in this case, that's what this group does.

They're blind with love and a little bit of fear and a lot of grief. And then you do very dumb things from time to time when that happens. And people do things in groups that they would never do by themselves, right? Oh, you have someone egging you on. Yeah, it's like, you know, when you hear chug, chug, chug, you know something bad's about to happen. But if you're at a party, you join the chorus. So, yeah. You know, in this book, there are a lot of villains and even monsters.

It really seems to be an exploration also of male bravado or ego. Is male ego a villain in this book? I think it's a little bit of a villain because it leads them to do very bad things. But hopefully there's another side to that. There's a little bit on the other side of the balance, which is there's a very, very small part of toxic masculinity that I think we should keep. We should do away with 99% of it. But there's this whole thing where in Latino macho culture, if you see an old lady about to cross the street, you help her out. If someone's on a vacation and they call you up, they say, you take care of my mom.

She can't go get groceries today. You do that. So it's this deep, bad thing that has some very small shining elements like sticking together, like standing up for what's right. And, you know, in this case, like fighting against colonialism or racism or homophobia and doing it together. I think that part is Hurricane Maria. And it's also the name of the character who's murdered, the mother who's murdered. Why did you make that choice to really center Hurricane Maria in this way? Well, it was almost out of my hands. I wanted to celebrate a woman whose life had ended and her name was Maria. And then Hurricane Maria, I wanted to, you know, use that hurricane in the book so it just worked out beautifully for me that both of them were named Maria so shout out to all my Latinos

brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings for using Maria so much all the time. You know like I think that for a lot of people who are not in Puerto Rico, unfortunately, Hurricane Maria is not top of mind. It seemed like in this book, in addition to the supernatural elements, like there's a very real failure of the government, of the U for survival, not just in the way that this group of boys are, but just fighting for food and water and all these things. Food, water, medicine, services, other products, feminine products, baby products. The hurricane comes, and if it's a bad one, it shuts down the country. So everyone's just basically left to fend for themselves from time to time. When the power is out in the whole island, we will get something like, you have to be on by 6 or 7 p.m. But then the cops won't come out because it's dark and scary, so no one's enforcing that. So it's chaos that ensues.

And in the case of Maria, it was chaos for a very, very, very long time. It finished basically obliterating a power grid that had been on its last leg for 20 years. And it's ugly, but it's worth remembering. It's one of those things like 9-11, you don't want to think about it every day, but it's there. It's a reality. Thousands of people died and, you know, they deserve to be memorialized. It deserved to be remembered in many, many ways. Hurricanes in this book, there's talk that hurricanes bring this dark, evil force. There are these myths that the characters talk about and believe with storms. Where did you get inspiration for them? Are these myths that you actually heard

or are these myths that you made up in composing the book? So besides being a writer, I'm a huge fan of literature. And when it comes to horror, I think every living major horror writer has sort of their own mythos, right? And for me, I knew I wanted to do something special to add something to the storm, to make it bad, not just on the physical front, but also add something and make it supernaturally bad, as horror does so well, right? And I realized that there's a point in your career where if you're going to do this for the long haul, you can start trying things like that to create your own universe, your own mythos, things that connect together, your own multiverse, if you will. And I knew that a hurricane, the word hurricane comes from the Taino word huracan. So, I was like, for the Taino Indians, the hurricanes were a bad thing. They were sort of like a bad spirit that came and destroyed things and it was loud and scary. And so, I decided to create a new god, a new dark god, a bloodthirsty old god

that comes with the storm and wrecks havoc as the winds take care of the physical part. Hmm. You know, I mean, I love horror as well. Do you feel like by adding in this kind of mythical force that it helps to make sense of the real? Because, you know, these are monstrous things in a way, right? Crime fiction and horror fiction are two of the most amazing, beautiful, and effective mirrors that we have to show society to ourselves. Or in the case of writers, show uh society and our ideas of it to our readers um i think that comes into playing in this novel it's like here's the storm you already know about the part destroyed homes and overrun places and you know the business are

shutting down and 90 billion you know against the economy but you do that little extra thing and so people start paying attention a little bit more because you make it just a little bit more interesting. I think we're callous when it comes to death. We're hearing about Ukraine all the time. We're hearing about Gaza. We're hearing about all of this death. We know people are dying right now as we're having this interview. And we don't think about that all the time. When you add that little bit, like that extra supernatural element, you make it weird again. You make us, hopefully if you do it right, you make readers realize just how dark and weird and powerful death is. And horror allows us to do that.

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Only from NPR. Welcome back to The Sunday Story. I'm speaking with the author Gabino Iglesias about his new novel, House of Bone and Rain. It's a thriller, horror, and tale of male friendship all wrapped in one. I understand, though, that the inspiration for House of Bone and Rain came from a personal story from when you lived in Puerto Rico. Are you comfortable with sharing that? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's the novel that has taken me the longest to write because in the summer of 1999,

the inciting incident that opens House of Born Rain happened to me and my friends. And so we swore, you know, it's young, dumb men who grew up watching Goodfellas. So what are we going to do? We're going to get revenge. No, we're not, because life's not a movie or a Gabino Iglesias novel. So you're not going to do that. So did the mother of one of your friends get murdered? Yeah, she got murdered doing that exact same job. She was checking IDs at a place called Laser Club, and there was a drive-by. And she died there, and it really changed our senior year.

And her name was Maria? And her name was Maria. So I had to go with that. I had no option. And then the hurricane, too. Wow. Wow. And so how was that defining for you?

So you didn't obviously go on this journey, this bloodthirsty journey. But how does that define you? Or how did that shape you? So we did nothing. Because like I said, life's not a movie, but we talked about doing things. As you're in your group, it's all good. We have each other's back. We're going to get this done no matter the cost. And then folks go away, they go home and then you're left alone and you're wondering, am I really going to do this? Is this a good idea or is this how I die? I love my friends.

I believe in that friendship that's so deep that you would take a bullet from someone. But that's easy to say when no one has a gun in the room. So when someone shows up with a gun, then you have to think about, am I really going to take a bullet for this person? And I think in the House of Born Rain, most of the characters at the beginning sort of have that thought process, and they decide that they will, that they will take this to the farthest ends of the earth, and whatever consequences come their way, they're willing to do that.

Do you think your life could have gone in a different direction if you had someone who was really like Bimbo and really, really about that life, as they say? Do you think your life could have gone in a different direction if you had someone who was really like Bimbo and really, really about that life, as they say? Do you think? I've had a couple of friends who were all about that life. Some of them are lucked up right now. Some of them kind of moved away and realized that, you know, you can die very easily. And I moved to Austin in 2008 and became a normal citizen that doesn't hang out with people like that anymore. But I still love them.

And even the friends that I have in prison, they're beautiful people who made a lot of bad choices. So no judgment. You know, one thing about this book, obviously, is set in Puerto Rico. You use a lot of Spanish on almost every page or every other page like there are long parts that are in Spanish and I had to do a lot of google translate and get all of that out and learned a lot of Spanish curse words I didn't know how how did you make that decision to include it in the book I'm going to walk out of here and add, I showed how to talk bad words in Spanish to my resume.

That is popping up on the CV as we speak. And I'm a perpetual ESL person. English is my second language. I didn't speak a word of it until I was like in sixth or seventh grade. And in 2015, I was writing my novel, Zero Saints. And I couldn't write a page of dialogue without having to stop 25 times to think about the dialogue that was coming to me in Spanish. And then translating it and making it make sense. Because there's literal translation in which, you know, usually you lose a lot of context.

You lose some power. You lose some passion sometimes. Some things just don't make sense when you translate them. And in 2015, I decided I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to write the dialogue as it comes to me. After that book came out, I received a lot of hate mail about you need to write an American for an American market and all that stuff. And then I realized, wow, I have a power. And that power is, as an English as a second language speaker, I might be talking to you on NPR and suddenly I forget a word.

And I have to sit there and try to think about it. And it's scary. And it's very uncomfortable. It's unsettling. You're always afraid that people are going to judge you. They're going to think you're not eloquent because you forgot that word, no matter your level of education. And then I realized if I can do this in my novels, people who don't know Spanish for a brief moment will be pushed into the shoes of all of those in this country who are bilingual, have English as a second language, and our brains falter from time to time.

And if I can make you feel a little bit left outside as a monolingual reader, I think I accomplished something. If you're in U.S. soil, people don't think you don't know the language. So if you work somewhere and you're monolingual, they immediately start talking in English. They assume that you know. If you don't know, it's almost like a shock. They feel insulted that they have to deal with you. If my books can push people into that space when they realize that there are many other languages and other cultures and that not everything they're going to fully understand immediately,

then that's a beautiful thing. It's a great power to have. You've talked about how much you love horror. And in The House of Bone and Rain, Gabe describes the five friends being like a tight-knit group of kids in a Stephen King novel. I'm thinking Stand By Me. But what drew you to the horror genre?

You've talked a little bit about why you think it's so useful, but what drew you to it? Remember I said it was sixth or seventh grade where I started writing English. At the end of that year, our teacher, Ms. Delayana, asked us to write a short story so she could analyze our English skills. And I kind of realized then that the kind of stories that I really liked were spooky stories, stories that unsettled me, that kind of made me want to turn on the light. Or if I had to go to bed, I wanted to have that sensation in the back of my neck that I have to turn off the light and run into my room.

In that process, I wrote a short story for this teacher where really bad things happened. A woman in my neighborhood had some kind of mutant baby that she locked in a room in her house in a basement, which is fiction because Puerto Rican houses don't have basements. And one day the baby just grows too much and goes out and murders the entire neighborhood. So that's a story that I turned in, not knowing then, sixth or seventh grade, that I needed to change the names. Long story short, my parents got called to school. Your son wrote a horrible thing about murdering everyone and their dog. And that was the only time I remember my father going to school. He sat there and he listened to the lady talk about my horrible story.

And at the end, he looked at her and said, that's great. And I see your point. But please tell me this. Was it well written? And at that moment, I realized I could get away with so much if I learned to write really well. That's Gabino Iglesias.

His new novel, House of Bone and Rain, is out now. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you so much. That was Gabino Iglesias. You can find his novel, House of Bone and Rain, wherever books are sold.

This episode was produced by Raina Cohen and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our engineer was Gilly Moon. The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Andrew Mambo. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.

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