Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (2021) and The Bullet Swallower (f2024), as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (2023).
Originally from South Texas, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts.
At CrimeReads the author tagged eleven "books that complicated my picture of the American west, specifically Texas (my home state), and delighted my taste for the weird." One title on the list:
Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You HomeRead about the other entries on the list.
Being a fairly new reader of horror, I was very excited for Iglesias’s latest. Mario has recently lost his young daughter tocancer, and his wife to grief, and so with nothing to live for he becomes a hitman. When a friend offers him the chance to make a huge sum of money doing a job for a narco-cartel, he agrees, and is launched into a nightmare world of violence and cruelty. Fair warning: This book is dark. DARK. But as someone who grew up on the border amid the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, where, it turns out, cults were actually sacrificing people to the devil, I found Iglesias’s descent into the grim world of drug-fueled violence chillingly rendered and all too real.
--Marshal Zeringue
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