Un Fantasma En Hialeah Gardens / A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens

A modern-day Bob Cratchit, living in a dank efficiency apartment, Hugo Contreras knows he will never stop paying for his late wife's medical debts or for his own debt accumulated in his youth. His Scrooge is Alexi Ramirez, an avaricious Cuban American debt-collection attorney with a face familiar from his bus stop ads and a serious problem of his own: a haunting at his family's McMansion.

It's under these circumstances that the two men meet face to face, for Hugo works as a babal嫬o, helping people in Miami cleanse their homes of evil. He's long since stopped believing in the supernatural himself, but when Alexi, whom Hugo despises because he has been garnering his wages for years, promises to forgive Hugo's debts in exchange for his services, he can't refuse. Intent on both escaping his debt and exacting revenge for his late wife, Hugo will do what he's done with dozens of clients before: use slight-of-hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed and escape debt-free before the coming Christmas holiday.
Of course, life in a corrupt capitalist system is never that simple, especially when it involves disturbingly vivid dreams of Christmases past and present, sexually transmitted infections, home d嶰or catalogues, and an ancient devil who has been keeping tabs on Hugo since his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines. Hugo's personal history--including a fraught crossing to the United States as a boy and the wrenching, guilt-ridden circumstances of the death of his wife Meli--collides with Alexi's demons in a (literally) explosive climax that forces Hugo to decide whether he will live as a debt-free man, or consign himself to the debts of his lost loved ones.

With a touch of the satiric humor of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the political consciousness of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and the genre-bending flair of Victor LaValle's The Devil in Silver, A HAUNTING IN HIALEAH GARDENS reimagines Dickens's classic to reflect a new century and a brilliant exploration of the invisibility and extreme influence that debt has over the lives of people in the 21st century.