Panic, caffeine and spite: A chat with Gabino Iglesias

“God works in mysterious ways, thought the coyote for a second, but he gets really fucking weird when it comes to poor people and dangerous places.”
― Gabino Iglesias, Coyote Songs

Gabino Iglesias is a new inspiration to me. A horror writer from Puerto Rico, he’s one of the hottest new names in genre fiction. I was lucky enough to meet him at last year’s ConCarolinas and he was friendly and gracious, so I picked up his Coyote Songs and …. whoa.

Good book.

Thus I was delighted to catch an online masterclass with Iglesias hosted by the Santa Fe Writers Institute in April. Like most of these, it was more of a friendly interview than an actual workshop, but that was okay, because I wanted to learn more about his journey.

Iglesias has been writing for decades, but like most of us, it took him 20 years to become an overnight sensation. He got his start in small presses, just like me. When he wrote The Devil Takes You Home he had three jobs. “I didn’t have 3–4 hours to come up with a mediocre paragraph,” he said. So he did his “writing” in the shower, on his lunch break, driving from job to job.

“What people with money don’t understand is that most poor people’s problems can be solved with money. There are problems that won’t go away no matter how many bills you throw at them, but for people like me, for folks whose nightmares have names like hunger and eviction, money is a wonderful thing that can make tribulations…