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I wanted to like this, but it did nothing for me. Revenge stories aren't my thing and that should have been enough to get me to leave it alone from the beginning. But since it was horror I thought there would be some interesting stuff to come. But this never felt much like horror to me, even though it had supernatural elements eventually. It felt much more like a magical realism revenge story, maybe you could stretch to folk horror.

I was so frustrated by the constantly terrible decisions Bimbo made, and Gabe's willingness to follow along even when he knows better. (Gabe knows better a little too much, as a 1st person narrator he is often wise in a way that simply does not match with him as a character, but it also isn't presented as an older, wiser Gabe telling the story. This mismatch was consistently a struggle for me.) The violence only begets more violence. Bimbo's friends never hold him accountable, and even when Gabe occasionally tries to show that this is a vicious cycle, it is ultimately one that tends to look more rewarding than terrible in the text. The deaths of major characters are treated as weirdly perfunctory. And everything works out well in a way that it really shouldn't and that often defied believability for me.

I listened on audio and the narrator didn't have a good appreciation for Iglesias' prose. Iglesias likes these really sharp observations and single sentences that really convey mood very well, it's by far the thing I liked most about the book. But the narrator often rushed past them or didn't give them the emphasis they clearly should have had.