Juan Pablo Villalobos's short debut novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, is a galloping, violent fairy tale. Tochtli, the sheltered young son of a drug lord, shaved bald and too macho to cry, has a lavish collection of hats from all over the world and enjoys reading the dictionary and using new words like "sordid," "pathetic" and "devastating." He lives in a palace in the middle of nowhere with a gym, a sauna and a swimming pool. Because of his father's fortunes in pesos, dollars and euros, Tochtli has met only 14 people in his life, including armed guards.
His disturbing account of daily life amid limitless wealth is peppered with casual executions, sheltered by the love of a ruthless criminal father who lectures his son on how many bullets are needed to turn people into corpses and who assures him that "gangs are about not hiding things and seeing the truth." Then one day Tochtli discovers that one of the locked "empty rooms they don't use" is really the gun and rifle room. His father is lying to him.
Suddenly we're on a flight to Paris, with the characters disguised (even from the reader) under fake names modeled on the Honduran soccer team, en route to Africa to get the boy the pet he wants, a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Wandering the drug lord's compound in his pajamas (he's a samurai), Tochtli makes the best of his life, like a captive Little Prince, incontestably loved by a brutal, sociopathic father who tries to grant his son's every wish. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle