A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores the weight of the devil’s bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom.
Hugo Contreras’s world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo’s debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.
One day, Hugo’s nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo’s debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there’s one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn’t believe in spirits.
Hugo plans to do what he’s done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo’s old tricks don’t work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi’s demons in an explosive climax.
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe—to ourselves, our families, and our histories.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Hugo Contreras’s world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo’s debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.
One day, Hugo’s nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo’s debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there’s one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn’t believe in spirits.
Hugo plans to do what he’s done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo’s old tricks don’t work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi’s demons in an explosive climax.
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe—to ourselves, our families, and our histories.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"The modern thriller, fantasy, magic, horror and the literary immigrant novel overlap in this at turns darkly funny, at turns heartbreaking and always disruptive debut from Raul Palma. In the ways that Walter Mosley maps and curates Los Angeles and its underbelly, Palma maps Miami - bringing the same intimacy and nuance to his cartography of place and character. Through elegant prose we follow Hugo Contreras on an epic quest for self and to resolve duty and love and redemption." - Chris Abani
"A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is a sensitive and finely-wrought debut novel. Filled with currents of magic and sparked with sly infusions of humor, this deeply human tale of loss and grief makes room for the spiritual and the inexplicable, along with a gentle back beat of absurdism. These stories will resonate with any reader who knows what it is to straddle identities and traditions." - Diana Abu-Jaber
"Raul Palma's novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, offers us hilarity and heartbreak in equal measure. With lush prose and an unerring eye, Palma chronicles the substrata of Miami - the human costs of immigration, poverty, debt, discrimination, and, yes, ghosts - beneath the city's breezy, tropical surface. A pitch-perfect debut." - Cristina García
"Raul Palma's A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is the Florida novel of our moment. In a Miami filled with ghosts, curses, and personal loss, a Bolivian American babalawo and his debt collector negotiate their immigrant histories and identities in relation to one another. Channeling Junot Diaz, Helena Maria Viramontes, and even Nathanial Hawthorne, Palma playfully limns gothic and supernatural literary traditions in order to offer a serious critique of a post-racial and post-ethnic American Dream." - Kristiana Kahakauwila
"With his new novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, Raul Palma continues to provide a fresh and vital perspective on the tensions within and around Miami's immigrant communities, particularly between those who've 'made it' and those who have yet to, and may never, do so. Palma's nuanced representations of the physical, emotional, and ethical costs of both positions are deeply poignant, affecting, and tinged with a dark humor, reflecting the author's expansive, not uncritical heart." - Michael Mejia
"A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, Raul Palma's searing first novel, is a provocative portrait of Miami and of the lengths to which one man will go to absolve himself of the debts of the dead. In gorgeous, careful writing, Palma mines grief and longing for their twin attendant humors and horrors. A compulsively readable debut!" - David James Poissant
"In this Faustian hell of a debut, the prose ripples with a mythical rhythm. Raul Palma has taken a splash of Oscar Hijuelos' musical cadence, a dash of Alejo Carpentier's magic realism, and along with his own considerable power to depict Miami lore, its humanism, its African rituals, its mysterious legends, its strong coffee - the end result is this suspenseful, stylistic, and sensory classic." - Ernesto Quiñonez
"Evocative and insightful, Raul Palma's writing explores the soul-crushing burden of debt, both financial and emotional. A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens masquerades as a humorous supernatural tale while reflecting deeply on the immigrant experience and daring to question the unsustainable human costs of the illusory American dream." - Rudy Ruiz
"Bright with humor and vulnerability, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens invites us to plunge deep into the crushing darkness of indebtedness. Whether financial, spiritual, or romantic, past and present, Palma splendidly conjures demonic debts in every sense, crafting a story both thrilling and tragic. An affecting novel about the invisible demons that truly haunt us." - Gerardo Sámano Córdova
"A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is a sensitive and finely-wrought debut novel. Filled with currents of magic and sparked with sly infusions of humor, this deeply human tale of loss and grief makes room for the spiritual and the inexplicable, along with a gentle back beat of absurdism. These stories will resonate with any reader who knows what it is to straddle identities and traditions." - Diana Abu-Jaber
"Raul Palma's novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, offers us hilarity and heartbreak in equal measure. With lush prose and an unerring eye, Palma chronicles the substrata of Miami - the human costs of immigration, poverty, debt, discrimination, and, yes, ghosts - beneath the city's breezy, tropical surface. A pitch-perfect debut." - Cristina García
"Raul Palma's A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is the Florida novel of our moment. In a Miami filled with ghosts, curses, and personal loss, a Bolivian American babalawo and his debt collector negotiate their immigrant histories and identities in relation to one another. Channeling Junot Diaz, Helena Maria Viramontes, and even Nathanial Hawthorne, Palma playfully limns gothic and supernatural literary traditions in order to offer a serious critique of a post-racial and post-ethnic American Dream." - Kristiana Kahakauwila
"With his new novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, Raul Palma continues to provide a fresh and vital perspective on the tensions within and around Miami's immigrant communities, particularly between those who've 'made it' and those who have yet to, and may never, do so. Palma's nuanced representations of the physical, emotional, and ethical costs of both positions are deeply poignant, affecting, and tinged with a dark humor, reflecting the author's expansive, not uncritical heart." - Michael Mejia
"A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, Raul Palma's searing first novel, is a provocative portrait of Miami and of the lengths to which one man will go to absolve himself of the debts of the dead. In gorgeous, careful writing, Palma mines grief and longing for their twin attendant humors and horrors. A compulsively readable debut!" - David James Poissant
"In this Faustian hell of a debut, the prose ripples with a mythical rhythm. Raul Palma has taken a splash of Oscar Hijuelos' musical cadence, a dash of Alejo Carpentier's magic realism, and along with his own considerable power to depict Miami lore, its humanism, its African rituals, its mysterious legends, its strong coffee - the end result is this suspenseful, stylistic, and sensory classic." - Ernesto Quiñonez
"Evocative and insightful, Raul Palma's writing explores the soul-crushing burden of debt, both financial and emotional. A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens masquerades as a humorous supernatural tale while reflecting deeply on the immigrant experience and daring to question the unsustainable human costs of the illusory American dream." - Rudy Ruiz
"Bright with humor and vulnerability, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens invites us to plunge deep into the crushing darkness of indebtedness. Whether financial, spiritual, or romantic, past and present, Palma splendidly conjures demonic debts in every sense, crafting a story both thrilling and tragic. An affecting novel about the invisible demons that truly haunt us." - Gerardo Sámano Córdova
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