(bell rings) (slow music) - [Gabino] I'm Gabino Iglesias and this is "The Devil Takes You Home."

It's a book about three individuals doing all of the worst things possible for all the right reasons.

(slow music) - What is it about horror that draws you to it so strongly?

- First of all, horror is about empathy, it doesn't work without empathy.

If you don't feel for your characters then however dark your story is gonna fall flat and that really attracts me to horror.

And the second one is that there are no limits.

You can do whatever you want because you can't define horror.

The whole idea that, well, horror is scary.

It can be but what's scary to you?

I really enjoy reading about vampires and zombies and werewolves and haunted houses, but that stuff doesn't scare me.

But then you can talk about sickness or something like cancer or poverty or losing a loved one.

Those are things that people experience every day and that's also horrific so it's horror.

So horror is, it's funny, it's sexy, it's entertaining, it's weird, it's unsettling.

It can be a whole range of things.

And when you tap into something like that the sky is the limit.

Whatever you want to put into horror, horror is the perfect dancing partner for anything that you can imagine.

(slow music) - [Jeremy] You made the choice to write this book in English, in Spanish, and then Spanglish.

- Yep.

- Was that a risky choice and why was it important do you think to include it this way?

- It was a super risky choice and it's the third book that I've done that way and a lot of people have very strong opinions about that.

And some people stop reading and you get a lot of one-star reviews.

I chose to do it that way number one, because it makes me feel authentic.

Like this is how the characters that I'm writing about, this is how they talk.

It's also how I talk.

And it's the reality for a lot of people in this country who are not native speakers.

I was sitting there with the New York Times doing an interview and they asked me about my grandma.

And I was telling them that when I scraped my knee, she would take me to her pack of dogs and she would say, let the dogs lick your wounds because that's how they heal themselves.

And when this happens at home my mom gives me, she pours on my little wound a little bit off and then I stopped.

And for the life of me I could not remember oxygen peroxide 'cause you don't use that every day but I remember (foreign language) so I had the term in Spanish and I couldn't find it in English.

And if I'm writing and that happens, I don't sit there and look for the words anymore.

It's my characters, if the word shows up in Spanish in their dialogue, it goes on the page in Spanish.

- I will tell you that truly literary sentences they jump out and I flagged them.

There was a two or three that I have seen so far.

There were just beautiful sentences.

Just really right to the gut, beautiful sentences.

So I think that it plays so well in horror and crime because so much of it is just a description and you're telling an engaging story that's rushing along like a freight train.

And so when then you do slip in really beautiful sentences, it really I think resonates.

I know it resonated me for a reader.

I'm sure it does for you too.

- Well, I'm glad.

When you're doing really horrible things you sometimes have to stop and let the reader catch their breath.

And I think you can do that with writing that still pushes the story forward but you don't have to go 120 miles per hour at all times otherwise it becomes monotone.

So you slow it down and you write slightly different.

(slow music) - [Jeremy] Character Mario does a lot of bad things, Mario does a lot of bad things but you root for him.

And I wonder how difficult that was to put those two together.

- I think Mario is of all the books that I've written the character that's closest to me.

I was in the process of writing this novel when I lost my job as a teacher, my main source of income.

And the gig that gave me health insurance, that allowed me to sleep at night.

And I lost my job, my last day was June 1st of 2020 as the pandemic was raging.

So there was a lot of anger and fear and what am I gonna do now?

So Mario, I had already developed that character but suddenly it became like we're brothers, we're going through this thing together and let me put some of my own real fear and anger into this character 'cause it'll just allow me to get that off my chest somehow without going to therapy so the page became therapy for me.

And he's a normal guy.

He's a dad, he works at an insurance company, he has a house, some bills and a baby daughter.

And life usually takes weird turns and sometimes it's for good and sometimes it's really awful turns and he finds himself suddenly desperate and he's lost everything.

And when you're in a very, very desperate situation, and I think everybody watching this has been in a desperate situation at some point in time.

You surprise yourself with the things that you'll do to get out.

And I think he just takes that to an extreme.

If you go from having everything that you sort of wanted and you were a happy person then suddenly everything crumbles, whatever gives you the idea that you can do this thing and it might allow you to build back up to get back some of what you had, you blindly go into that and you do really bad things without thinking about it too much.

(slow music) - There is a lot of anger simmering in this book and sometimes it just explodes off the page.

So for you what prompted that anger and why do you feel it's so important in telling this story?

- I think we're all angry.

I think we have plenty of reasons to be angry.

I think if you wake up in the morning and you read the news, you will find 25 reasons every single day to be angry.

Whether it's white supremacist speaking nonsense or the Supreme Court taking rights away from people or on a more local level really awful things that are happening.

I just know that as a naturally somewhat angry person, I need to deal with that.

I need to focus on the silver lining.

I need to walk out of the house and listen to the birds and enjoy the rain and listen to good music and talk to friends and the laughter of children and that kinda stuff that heals your soul.

But I also need a place for the anger, I also need to talk about systemic racism.

I also need to talk about how if you have an accent people think you're dumb.

I also need to talk about the LGBTQ community being erased by a group of people.

And I can't yell that at my neighbor, that'd be really weird.

So I lock myself in a tiny room with really dark music and I pound away at the keys and it's sort of, okay, that's done.

It's out of my system for a little bit and then when he comes back I have to go back to the page and let it flow out so I can live a happy life.

(slow music) - I do think it's important to talk about that writers of color are severely underrepresented in the publishing industry.

And I think on social media you've really become a voice for them.

And I wondered if that became naturally or is that something that you were angry about too that these people need a bullhorn?

- I was angry about the lack of representation from the start but it wasn't too bad until I started talking about it.

When I started talking about it, 100,000 people were ready, willing and able to educate me and say, well, it's not that they're underrepresented it's just that what gets published is the quality stuff.

And so suddenly I realized, so being a writer of color or being a member of the LGBTQ community immediately means that you're writing stuff that's less, it's worse somehow, let me go figure this out.

And then I spent years sort of studying things like for example, I'm a book reviewer.

I write for, for NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe.

Any given year reviewers of color make about 7% of the pool.

So out of every 100 reviewers you have seven of them who are reviewers of color.

There's a new study published recently that said, looked at media in general.

So it turns out that it's also around 7% Latinos and Latinas in publishing, 4% men, 3% women.

So whether you're Asian or black or brown or whatever you are, you start looking at the studies that are out there and you realize how short, how small, how insignificant that percentage is.

And we're still working on that.

I've edited various anthologies and I read blindly.

And at the end of each one of those anthologies I end up with a whole bunch of like straight white guys and also a bunch of people of color and queer writers.

So it's the whole quality thing kind of crumbled once I started looking into that.

So there's other things, there's other things that play into that.

And it's an ongoing battle until we have that equality that we all dreamed about then we have to keep going.

(slow music) I think because the book is so angry and violent and brutal and dark and like underground creatures and all that sort of stuff, I think people sort of skim over the part where it's also about hope.

Each one of these characters is like, I'm gonna do all this horrible things because I hope in the case of one of the characters, he's about to be a dad and he's like I want to give my kid a better future.

In the case of Mario, the main character he's like, I want to rebuild my life.

I want to offer my wife something that we can push forward in life and we can have a better existence.

And the last guy, arguably the baddest guy in the book, he's trying to protect mom.

He's trying to move mom away from his little house where he grew up in and give her a better house and a better future after losing two of his sons.

So it's an ultimately about hope.

We all want a little bit more.

We don't wanna settle, we want something better for us and for our loved ones, and that's at the core of the book.

But sometimes all the violence and the darkness and the horror get in the middle and a lot of people kind of just miss that point.

So if I can tell them to take anything from the book is, it's about hope ultimately.

- I just really applaud you, Gabino.

I think you've written a great book and it's a really eyeopening book and I just so appreciate you making the time to speak with us today.

- No, thank you, thank you for having me.

- And thank you for watching.

And remember, keep reading, or as Gabino would say.

(foreign language) - [Gabino] I wrote a short story about a woman in my neighborhood who had a deformed baby who grew up to be a monster and murders half of the neighborhood.

My parents were called in, my dad went to school and when the lady was completely done with her spiel my dad looked at her and said, but was it well written?

(slow music)