Devil Takes You Home

 

Devil Takes You Home was one of my HIGHLY anticipated reads of 2022. In fact, I was SO excited that I made it a Book of the Month selection, completely forgetting that I had pre-ordered it from my local bookstore. (Which prompted me to start ANOTHER literary spreadsheet with all of my pre-ordered books out of love for my local bookstore) Not knowing much Spanish I would have felt lost at times without the Spanish translation guide that came with my Book of the Month selection.  This slowed down my reading process as I would read a phrase, look it up and then reread the phrase to fully understand the context in which it was utilized.  This process brought a very important perspective for me on the book, bringing to light the difficulties of navigating a language that is foreign to me, which is the experience that people whose primary language is not English must navigate on a daily basis. Yes, it would have been even more challenging to read without the translation guide, but it would not have been that hard to Google phrases to understand what I was reading.  Or I could have not taken the time to look up the Spanish and just be in the dark at times about what was going on. (Which is another way that we do not make our country accessible to people who do not speak English).   I appreciated the realistic portrayal of Spanglish, which set the mood of navigating between the realities of two different languages.

 One of the reasons that I love horror is that it does not gloss over the harder realities of the world. The Devil Takes You Home does an excellent job with these realities. It portrayed very painfully realistic picture of dealing with the loss of a child and the stress that it puts on a marriage. The raw emotions of dealing with poverty and racism on a daily basis were eloquently written by infusing a lot of heart and humanity into the violent, intriguing life of a hitman. This made the challenging, slower read worth my while and it is one of my favorite books of 2022.

I am also posting this review on Goodreads and a modified version on Amazon