House of the Scorpion/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And I Must Scream: The fate that is planned for Matt. Having all his organs taken out one by one to keep El Patron alive.
  • Complete Monster: Much of the family Matt lives with in the first half of the book and the Keepers at the second half fall under this trope. El Patron is described as "evil" several times, and his ruthlessness shows at times, but manages to avoid this trope since at first, he is the only person besides Celia, Tam Lin, and Maria who is nice to Matt when he came to the big house, and treats like a son, until the point where he needs his organs. El Patron is said to had to live by his wits when he was little, which is likely a contributing factor towards his nature.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The concept of Opium, a Latin American country ran by drug cartels, is becoming more and more possible with the Mexican Drug War at time of writing.
  • Nightmare Fuel: There's actually a surprising quantity of this for a pre-teen novel
    • Matt being captured and trapped in a room full of sawdust for six months at the tender age of six.
    • The entire concept of eejits: the individual's brain and free will is destroyed, meaning that if they are ordered to do something, they will continue to do so until ordered to stop, making it possible to be worked to death. One of the more graphic occurrences involve a dead man that Matt and Tam Lin come across in the opium fields, and Tam Lin states that he must have been too far to hear the call to come in. Matt then has a very graphic Imagine Spot of the man working and working until he passed out and died of dehydration.
    • The eejit teacher
    • MacGregor's clone; this is what all clones resemble, with the exception of Matt, on the grounds of El Patron's wealth, given that their higher brain functions are chemically destroyed at birth. MacGregor's clone is just the only one we see.
    • The bone pit.
  • Strangled by the Red String: Matt and Maria: Maria is basically the only girl around Matt's age in the entire book.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Cloning oneself to prolong their existence is immoral. Child labor is immoral. Turning people into computerized zombies is immoral.
  • What Do You Mean, It's For Preteens? Despite being marketed as a book for a pre-teen audience, the book is very dark and touches on several controversial ethics issues.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Political?: The central thematic elements in the story are a subtle critique of current American immigration politics, stem cell research, and narcotic policies.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/House_of_the_Scorpion/YMMV?oldid=960847"