Book Review – Gabino Iglesias – House Of Bone And Rain.

2024. Titan Books.

Spoilers.

A crime novel, set in Puerto Rico, that gradually turns supernatural and ultimately flat out Lovecraftian.

Told from multiple points of view, though mainly that of Gabe (Gabino?), this centres on five friends, Gabe, Bimbo, Xavier, Paul and Tava bonded all the more tightly when gangsters gun down the mother to one of them in what initially looks like a straight-forward drive by club shooting. With the police indifferent to investigating the case, the boys decide to get revenge by hunting down the killers one by one, only to find they are tangling not only with the deadliest and most untouchable gangster on the island, but also occult, forces. To cap it all the Island is about to be hit by Maria, a real event from 2017 one of the most savage hurricanes in history, killing around 3,000 islanders, and sharing its name with the woman killed by the gangsters as though carrying her divine retribution and rage at the action taken by her son and his friends.

Apparently, Gabino was a friend to a young man who lost his mother in such a club-killing and there had been serious consideration of going on a revenge attack but the real lads came to their senses and didn’t do it. The book is in some respects an exploration of how things might have gone had they got guns and tried taking the law into their own hands.

After they brutally torture and kill an early lead, counter-retribution, bad karma and ghostly shadowings kick in quickly. One of the boys (actually men in their early 20’s), is killed, and Gabe’s own mother is assaulted by thugs looking for him. The conflict begins to take on an eye for an eye sense of escalating violence that threatens to leave everyone dead in a fairly typical noir fashion, but other forces are at work too.

Initially warnings of ghosts riding the storm seem allegorical. Gabe in particular feels the dead are watching him, and memories and conscience are seen as ghosts too, but it soon becomes clear that actual ghosts are actively watching and participating in matters, and something more too. Girlfriends to the boys, saddened that the men won’t turn back from their vendetta, resort to voodoo to protect them, even drawing on support from the Haitian Death God, Baron Samadhi, a recurring figure in popular culture (he even turns up in the James Bond movie Live & Let Die).

The horror angle gets increasingly foregrounded. Gambino allows the gang to compare themselves to the Stephen (Richard Bachman) King characters in The Body, filmed as Stand By Me, a rare non-horror work by the Master, but this goes towards a more traditional and seminal horror work in its second act, H P Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Though never directly referenced, the book is hinted at on many levels.

As the boys go after the more serious senior gangsters as opposed to their goons they hear increasingly of bodies being dumped almost sacrificially over a coastal reef, with amphibeous fish entities assisting in the disposals and similar hybrid creatures travelling in the gangs. Later, this proves to literally the case. At one point, the boys learn that the mer-men lived in an undersea realm close to Massachusetts before it was bombed and they had to move, settling off Puerto Rico, and making a fresh symbiotic alliance with the gangster community there.

So who are these Massachussets fish people? Gambino doesn’t spell out what many hardcore horror fans will often know and recognize.

Sub-Review – H P Lovecraft – The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

1931 – Spoilers.

Lovecraft’s best work, and a core text in his Cthulhu mythos cycle. The novella tells from it’s narrator of his visit to once proudly prosperous Massachusetts fishing town, Innsmouth. Arriving there after breaking away from a tour bus he has crossed the state with, he finds the town run down and delipidated but still inhabited. The people hide in shadows, and many have mutations like fish scales and frog-skins. The narrator learns that as the fishing has failed to continue to provide prosperity, the people have been persuaded to abandon Christianity and worship a marine deity called Dagon (the short Lovecraft story Dagon uses many elements of the later longer Shadows version). Members of the cult have met and often mated with mermaid creatures known as The Deep Ones, and their offspring, though humanoid most of their lives are beginning to turn into Deep Ones now. The narrator learns that the Deep Ones ultimately plan to raise Shoggoths and conquer the World. The narrator escapes the village and warns the authorities, who bomb and destroy the reefs around Innsmouth. Could this be the Massachussets destruction the Puerto Rican fish people fled? In Shadows, the narrator finds he himself is turning into a Deep One. (he is a descendant of the original cult’s founder member).

Returning to House Of Bone And Rain.

Learning more of the gang’s associations with the fish people on the reefs through a touching scene wherein they talk to Henry, a local drug addicted fisherman, (a similar figure gives the narrator essential exposition in the Lovecraft tale) the boys attack El Brujo, second in command to Papalote, the main Godfather figure of the story. El Brujo proves to be the most powerful opponent in the work, and the most magical. He moves so quickly he is virtually teleporting (I was reminded of Night-Crawler in the X-Men comics and movies). He is hideously strong and incapacitating him proves to be quite an epic struggle.

For this reason, I expected the final capture/killing of Papalote to be even more epic, but the boys catch him in bed, sleeping and he is taken down with relatively little resistance which felt a little anti-climatic, but that is part of the author’s final mood shift for the work. The boys now directly see the fish people themselves, (treated more sympathetically than they were by Lovecraft), even engaging in assistance from them in disposing of the bodies.

The closing pages drag the boys back to the harsh realities of the enormous damage caused by the storm. Hurricane Marie has enabled them to move around without attracting suspicion, but now they see the impact it had on the island. Gabe also finds that Xavier’s death was not through Papalote’s activity at all, but a betrayal by someone much closer to his circle, and the boys having ignored the pleas by their lovers not to pursue retribution, endangering the girls and pushing them to gain occult protections too, means their relationships may be irrecoverably broken.

This is a great rich novel, working on several levels, crime noir, disaster, occultism, fantasy and pure horror. After the outlandish dangers, it is the harsh realities the boys are least equipped to cope with. The dead mother was dealing in drugs, the storm itself is not a symbolic rage but a natural force of tragedy, and the final images are of the characters moving on in their lives, in some cases separated from their girlfriends and Purto Rico itself, with Gabe sensing that some ghostly figure is still haunting him (Xavier, a fish-being, Maria?).

The book was selected as a read for Preston’s Vinyl Tap Beer & Books book club to study, and one of the best choices made there to date. Thanks to Milly Angel, Vinyl Tap and all the group’s readers. Andy, one of our members, celebrated his birthday for which Millie brought along some lovely home made cakes for everyone too.

Youtube – The Lovecraft Society song – Fishmen (another great inspiration from the Lovecraft Novella). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI&list=RD3tTHn2tHhcI&start_radio=1

Baron Samedhi’s final appearance as the credits role in the James Bond film Live And Let Die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX3wGWHRlXQ

Photos taken by me.

Arthur Chappell