Book Review: ‘House of Bone and Rain,’ by Gabino Iglesias

HOUSE OF BONE AND RAIN, by Gabino Iglesias

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.