Order ZERO SAINTS here
(also reviewed)
Order GUTMOUTH here
Order HUNGRY DARKNESS here
Bad people are like dogs. They can smell your fear. That's when they pounce on you y te obligan a repartir chingazos o morir como un rata.
Some things are sexy until they put you in trouble. Masculinity for example, thinking of yourself as a straight shooting badass is great until it leads you to a confrontation and you have to stand your ground or be humiliated. That's why there are so many mediocre crime novels out there about a bunch of men acting like ten year-old kids playing cops and robbers. It takes experience to understand to weight of things and portray it in convincing manner.
I don't know what kind of experience Gabino Iglesias has with violent and death - I guess I should've asked him earlier this week - but I can tell from reading Zero Saints that he's seen some shit. We've waited a year since Broken River Books first announced its publication and it was worth crossing off every day on the calendar. Zero Saints is tough, dark and extremely violent sure, but it's also fiercely original and compassionate. It challenges the standards of contemporary crime fiction.
Fernando is an illegal Mexican immigrant who has fled the cartels to Austin, Texas where he works for the local drug kingpin. It's a rather quiet gig until he gets snatched off the street by members of infamous street gang MS-13, who announce their plans to take over the city and make an example of one of his colleagues in order to make sure the message is taken seriously. Traumatized and terrified by what he's seen, the ghost of the past he once fled surfaces in Fernando's mind. There is no good solution to his predicament and this time around, Fernando sure isn't going to take the safe option this time.
I have a lot to say about Zero Saints because it's a deceptively complex novel. It might not seem so at first glance because it tells a rather linear story, but once your start peeling off the layers, you don't stop. The first thing I want to address is the violence. Zero Saints is so fluid and engaging because the novel is a chain of events engendered by the gruesome first chapter. The novel feels dangerous and real because it understands the transformative power of violent events. The violence in Zero Saints is about survival, not solving your problems with weapons and bullets. It has lengthy and complicated effects on the life of the well-drawn and easy to love character that happens to be narrating the novel.
What happens when you cross la frontera is that la frontera keeps a piece of you, cuts you inside, hasta el hueso,where you can't heal yourself. It slashed you in places no blade or bullet can reach and cripples yo in places you don't understand.
Speaking of which, Fernando is a great lead character because he's about more than just the events of the novel. The first thing that will strike you about him is his loneliness. He is alone only like someone who left his life in another country can be. Sure, he ran away from Mexico for his own survival, but he still left a part of him there. He lives in America, but part of him is still over there. Another thing that makes Fernando lonely (and utterly relatable) is that he is a man of principles working with thieves and opportunists. He wants to do the right thing and face the reaper even if he has nothing to gain from it, except maybe a little peace of mind. Fernando's honorable and the fact that he's putting himself in danger solely to sort a interior conflict makes him interesting to me.
There's a fantasy variable to Zero Saints that I have to talk about. It takes a small, quiet place in the novel, but I thought it enhanced the final product considerably. Fernando is a spiritual (and somewhat superstitious) man who keeps praying to Santa Muerte throughout the novel and who filters reality through his beliefs a lot. It would normally be risky to dabble with supernatural in crime fiction, but it works in Zero Saints because it is subtle and understated. To a certain extent, it's reasonable to wonder how much of what's going on is interpreted by Fernando. Not knowing whether something is real or not and especially not feeding the answer to the reader is key to good fantasy/horror.
Zero Saints is a unique and challenging crime novel with literary ambitions. There's an entire poetic aspect to it involving the use of Spanglish that I haven't really discussed because it's not one of my strengths to do so, but I thought it gave an edge to the depiction of the border reality. It explores the boundaries of what crime fiction can talk about and how crime fiction should talk about murder and ruthlessness. Zero Saints is as far from my reality as it gets and it affected me emotionally, so I have no doubts that is has the power to change lives, which is the highest calling of literature. It might just be one of the best novels in Broken River Books' catalogue.
BADASS
There's a fantasy variable to Zero Saints that I have to talk about. It takes a small, quiet place in the novel, but I thought it enhanced the final product considerably. Fernando is a spiritual (and somewhat superstitious) man who keeps praying to Santa Muerte throughout the novel and who filters reality through his beliefs a lot. It would normally be risky to dabble with supernatural in crime fiction, but it works in Zero Saints because it is subtle and understated. To a certain extent, it's reasonable to wonder how much of what's going on is interpreted by Fernando. Not knowing whether something is real or not and especially not feeding the answer to the reader is key to good fantasy/horror.
Zero Saints is a unique and challenging crime novel with literary ambitions. There's an entire poetic aspect to it involving the use of Spanglish that I haven't really discussed because it's not one of my strengths to do so, but I thought it gave an edge to the depiction of the border reality. It explores the boundaries of what crime fiction can talk about and how crime fiction should talk about murder and ruthlessness. Zero Saints is as far from my reality as it gets and it affected me emotionally, so I have no doubts that is has the power to change lives, which is the highest calling of literature. It might just be one of the best novels in Broken River Books' catalogue.
BADASS
