🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "Coyote Songs" by Gabino Iglesias
This novel, proclaimed as a "barrio noir," was short and very intense. It combined the stories of six different Hispanic people who have their lives caught up in the chaos at the contemporary US-Mexico border. Some of those six are related to each other, some are not. They are:
Pedrito - a boy who sees his father killed by militia members, and joins up with the local cartel cleaner in order to get revenge.
The Mother - a woman who is host to a demon that is terrorizing the neighborhood, and must overcome her cocooning process to kill it.
The Coyote - a smuggler who works to get children across the border, but wants to take more direct action.
Jamie - a young man who just got out of prison but must immediately go on the run from the cops again after assaulting his mother's abusive boyfriend.
Alma - a performance artist who is driven to replace her symbolic, intellectual opposition to the white patriarchy with visceral, violent opposition.
La Bruja [The Witch] - a woman named Inmaculada who dies along with her family and other migrants in a truck abandoned in the desert. Her spirit's need for vengeance inspires the violent acts committed by the other characters, though at the end of the book she decides to ascend to the afterlife.
The book is very urgent, and full of punchy poetic imagery. The story is entirely focused on violent revenge against injustice; even though the omniscient witch at the end learns that this leads to a situation more complicated than the simple achievement of justice, none of the characters are shown regretting their actions. The book does not push the usual anti-vengeance “when you embark upon a journey of revenge, first dig two graves” narrative, which I appreciate.
The chapters rotate cyclically, and are themselves only a few pages long; so after one character is left in a charged moment or a cliffhanger, there are five other charged moments or cliffhangers to proceed through before the story is picked back up. This pressure never lets up, even when some characters are removed from the action and the chapter cycle is cut down. The urgency of the book matches the urgency of our times, and the challenges that Latinx people at the border face in the form of ICE agents, cartels, human traffickers, the Trump Administration, and other threats.
Did It Scare Me?
I felt a lot of suspense for some of the characters, even as their fates are telegraphed in advance. It can be agonizing waiting for the seemingly-inevitable violence to play out, even when you know exactly what is going to happen.