In 2022, to observe the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a powerful show of contemporary Puerto Rican artists responding to the horror and inevitability of that Category 4 storm. The exhibition’s title borrowed a verse from the poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: “no existe un mundo poshuracán,” or, roughly translated, “a post-hurricane world does not exist.” The hurricane’s devastating effects, in other words, are being felt to this day.
It’s a shame Gabino Iglesias’ ferocious new novel, “House of Bone and Rain,” couldn’t have been included as supplemental reading. The book captures, in stunningly visceral detail, not only the havoc of a hurricane that left thousands dead, but also the everyday life of a vulnerable community before and after Maria’s arrival, troubled by a crumbling infrastructure and by decades of governmental neglect. This is a novel chock-full of bleak observations. When the main character realizes that the death of a friend’s uncle, murdered by thieves trying to steal his electric generator, hadn’t even made the news, he surmises his fate correctly: “No one was coming to save us.”
Iglesias is the Book Review’s horror columnist, though his own novels defy such easy categorization. “The Devil Takes You Home” (2022) was, like the two books that preceded it, a horror-noir thriller with elements of other genres thrown in. “House of Bone and Rain” ranges from vigilante thriller to supernatural horror to coming-of-age friendship saga with a strong dose of folklore fantasy.
Foremost, though, it is a revenge plot. Our guide through the lawless, rough-and-tumble streets of greater San Juan is Gabe, a college freshman low on ambition, big on loyalty, who lives at home with his mother and still grieves his father, killed years earlier during another hurricane. Gabe is tight with his four best friends — Bimbo, Paul, Tavo and Xavier — who create a convincing portrait of contemporary Puerto Rican youth (the handsome, surf-loving Tavo is gay; Xavier manages temporarily to escape the poverty of his upbringing for a college on the other side of the island). “We fit together. We stuck together. We had each other’s backs,” Gabe declares. So when Bimbo’s mother, Maria, is gunned down while working the door of a nightclub in Old San Juan, Gabe and his friends make a pact to track down the killers no matter the cost.
This quest goes about as neatly as expected, with the group soon entering the cross hairs of the area’s most notorious and well-armed drug traffickers. But nothing is exactly as it seems in Iglesias’ San Juan. Maria turns out to have been dealing drugs on the wrong turf, and the coastal reef just off the city, routinely used to dump bodies, holds a disturbing secret of the mutant ecological fairy-tale variety.
On top of that, the mother of all hurricanes (one that not incidentally shares a name with Bimbo’s mother) is pounding down homes and knocking out the electrical grid. As Gabe puts it, “The island became a playground for death.”
Because of its emphasis on the sanctity of male friendship, “House of Bone and Rain” has drawn early comparisons to the film “Stand by Me.” But where “Stand by Me” revolves around four wholesome, pubescent boys who lose their innocence at the sight of a body hit by a train, Gabe and his ragtag teenage friends never had the luxury of innocence. They have grown up amid crime and corruption their entire lives. It is in Iglesias’ stark, authoritative, sometimes surprisingly beautiful descriptions of the grit and pessimism of urban Puerto Rico that his prose turns electric.
His commitment to authenticity also helps justify the extreme violence throughout the novel, where men are tortured, shot, stabbed, de-tongued and eaten. We hold out hope for Gabe and his friends even when they become increasingly as vicious as the bad guys they are bent on exterminating. “Revenge is the most beautiful, most destructive ballet in the world,” Gabe muses, brainwashed by the violence around him, “and you can’t have a part of it without the opposite half.”
Occasionally, Iglesias’ fearless embrace of the supernatural — babies are born with shark teeth, family members speak to one another through telepathy, the miraculous rites of the island Espiritismo produce over-the-top results — can leave the reader whirling between realities. But if there is a novel that reads more like living through a hurricane, I’m not sure I have the survival skills to read it.
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