AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The opening chapter of Gabino Iglesias' new horror novel, "House Of Bone And Rain," isn't just fiction. It's a story straight from the author's own life. The latest work from the Bram Stoker Award winner is set in Puerto Rico, where a close-knit group of friends are devastated when one of them loses his mother in a shooting. In Iglesias' real-life experience, grief and anger spark talk of revenge.
GABINO IGLESIAS: We swore. It's young, dumb men who grew up watching "Goodfellas." So, what are we going to do? We're going to get revenge.
RASCOE: As the novel explores, there's a big difference between discussing revenge and actually going through with it.
IGLESIAS: 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.
RASCOE: "House Of Bone And Rain" is an exploration of what might have been with the men in the book following the darker path. Gabino Iglesias joins us now from Austin, Texas. Welcome to the program.
IGLESIAS: Thank you so very much for having me, Ayesha.
RASCOE: I got to say, I really, really liked this book - really enjoyed it. But I want us to start the way you kind of start the book with the reader thrown right into the action. (Reading) Our awkward silence seemed to give him a resounding yes.
IGLESIAS: (Reading) And he placed his gun on top of his death 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. 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 into 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.
RASCOE: Now, that sets a scene.
IGLESIAS: (Laughter).
RASCOE: But tell us what's just happened here.
IGLESIAS: That unfortunate woman is the mother of one of these young boys trying to be men. She sadly took two bullets in the streets while doing her job, checking IDs outside a club. So these just young men got together and decided to seek vengeance to right the wrong that was done in the universe by avenging this dead woman.
RASCOE: This novel follows five friends - Bimbo, Tavo, Xavier, Paul, and Gabe - and they all consider themselves brothers. Their identities are shaped by this connection. But what I found so fascinating about the book is that it shows like how the group dynamic can be so powerful, but it also can lead to very dangerous and questionable choices.
IGLESIAS: And these individuals have been - as you said, they've been shaped by this friendship. So it's what we call nowadays the ride or die. There's no reason to die. You don't have to do those things. You could do some other things, and if you think it through - I think a lot of young men don't think things through. So 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.
RASCOE: And people do things in groups that they would never do by themselves.
IGLESIAS: Oh, you have someone egging you on. It's like, you know, when you hear chug, chug, chug. You know something bad is about to happen, but if you're at a party, you join the chorus.
RASCOE: And this is set in 2017 in Puerto Rico, and Gabe is like the main character, but the other major character is Hurricane Maria. And it's also the name of the character who's murdered. Why did you make that choice to really center Hurricane Maria in this way?
IGLESIAS: 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 use that hurricane in the book. So it just worked out beautifully for me that both of them were named Maria.
RASCOE: I think that for a lot of people who are not in Puerto Rico, unfortunately, Hurricane Maria has gone to the back of their minds, but it seemed like in this book, there's a very real failure of the U.S. government that leaves people desperate or just fighting for survival, fighting for food and water and all these things.
IGLESIAS: 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. It's chaos that ensues. In the case of Maria, it was chaos for a very, very, very long time. It's ugly, but it's worth remembering. Thousands of people died, and they deserve to be memorialized. They deserve to be remembered.
RASCOE: You use a lot of Spanish in the book. And I had to do a lot of Google Translate and learned...
IGLESIAS: (Laughter).
RASCOE: ...A lot of Spanish curse words I didn't know. How did you make that decision to include it in the book?
IGLESIAS: Going to walk out of here and add, I showed Ayesha bad words in Spanish, to my resume.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
IGLESIAS: That is popping up on the CV as we speak (laughter). English is my second language. I didn't speak a word of it until I was, like, in sixth or seventh grade. In 2015, I was writing my novel "Zero Saints," 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 usually you lose a lot of context. You lose some power, you lose some passion sometimes. In 2015, I decided, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to write the dialogue as it comes to me.
RASCOE: You've talked about how much you love horror, and in the book of "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?
IGLESIAS: It was sixth or seventh grade. At the end of that year, our teacher asked us to write a short story. And I kind of realized then that the kind of stories that I really liked were stories that unsettled me that kind of made me want to turn on the light. In that process, I wrote a short story for this teacher, where the woman in my neighborhood had some kind of mutant baby that she locked in a room in her house in a basement. 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. And at that moment, I realized I could get away with so much if I learned to write really well.
RASCOE: That's Gabino Iglesias. His new novel, "House Of Bone And Rain," is out now. Thank you so much for talking with us.
IGLESIAS: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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