House of Bone and Rain is a novel about revenge, as five Puerto Rican friends must come together to face the horrors in their lives. Five friends—Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo—in Puerto Rico are used to death, hearing all stories are ghost stories, but when Bimbo’s mother is killed, they agree to help him avenge her. As they fight their way to get information, a hurricane comes, and the lines between revenge, natural disaster, and otherworldly happenings are blurred.
Though positioned as a horror novel, House of Bone and Rain is more complex than that (the comparisons with Stand By Me perhaps reflect this fact well). The narrative is told mostly from Gabe’s perspective and it offers a complex picture of not only these friends, but others around them, and the lives they lead. Gabe, for example, is torn between his home, his friends, and the memory of his father’s death, and his girlfriend’s dream of leaving Puerto Rico. Even as Gabe is drawn into the violence of revenge and taking on a drug kingpin, he is also looking for purpose, and also sees the mystical happenings that show the world not to be as simple as some paint it.
The narrative is a coming-of-age story mixed with a classic revenge narrative: boys growing up and violence begetting violence, but also the undercurrent of colonialism and ecological collapse. It feels like a crime thriller film mixed with horror and I really enjoyed that, and the fact it didn’t shy away from the weird side of the horror as well. If you go into the book just expecting horror, you might find a lot of the book quite a different tone, but there’s a lot packed into it. Iglesias doesn’t give answers to everything and this works well as a coming-of-age novel that acknowledges the things that haunt you as you grow up can’t always be resolved or explained away.
Fiendfully Reading 
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