How It All Goes Down
This novel takes a lot of twists and turns, and information is revealed little by little in a zig-zagging fashion, with lots of flashbacks and narrator swaps. However, we'll break it down in chronological order here for you, just 'cause that's the kind of sweethearts we are.
First off, Juan Preciado's mother dies and makes him promise that he'll go to Comala to meet Pedro Páramo, his father whom he's never met, and make that jerk pay for not taking care of them.
Being a dutiful son (and apparently having nothing better to do) Juan takes off for Comala. When he gets there, he finds a ghost town. His guide, Abundio, gives him some advice on where to stay before dropping him off, so he goes to find Eduviges' house. She is an old friend of Juan's mom, but rambles on and on about a lot of crazy stuff.
Juan has to sleep on the floor because Eduviges doesn't have a bed for him, and he wakes up in the night to a man screaming. He's kind of freaked out, and to make matters worse another old lady shows up, Damiana Cisneros, and takes him to her house. The only problem ("only problem") is that she disappears into thin air on the street, right after telling him that the town is full of ghosts. And not the cute 'n' cuddly Casper kind.
Now Juan has really got the creeps, so he takes off and ends up being taken in by a brother and sister who live together, naked, in a dumpy, old house. They seem to be husband and wife as well as being siblings, which makes dealing with the in-laws that much easier, but dealing with the priest… not so much. This town just keeps getting more creeptacular by the moment.
Finally Juan out-and-out dies of fright and is buried in a coffin along with another woman, Dorotea. Maybe there's a coffin shortage in this town? In the coffin he finds out the story of Pedro Páramo, his father, by listening to the whispers and echoes of all the other dead people.
And Pedro's story goes a little like this:
Pedro Páramo was born into a poor farming family. They were broke and owed everybody money when his grandfather died. As a kid he's crazy about a little girl named Susana, and he thinks about her all the time. This is big-time puppy love: Susana moves away, but Pedro never forgets her.
Then Pedro's dad, Lucas, is murdered, and what does Pedro do? He goes crazy on a wedding party, killing everybody, because he's not sure who the killer was but knows that the killer was supposed to be at the wedding. And maybe he didn't like the bridesmaids' dresses, who knows? Anyway, after the massacre shows everyone that he's kind of a big (psychotic) deal, Pedro starts tricking people that his family owed money to. In one case, he marries a girl to keep from having to pay the debt his father owed her father. This girl, Dolores, will end up being Juan Preciado's mother.
Dolores hates living with Pedro because he's bossy, and always complains that she misses her sister. Pedro gets fed up with this and finally one day sends her on her way to live with her sister, and never calls her again. That's why Juan didn't know his father.
Pedro is a real ladies' man/scumbag and has children with half of the women in Comala. One of them dies in childbirth though, and the priest, Father Renteríaia, takes the baby up to Pedro's ranch, named the Media Luna. The baby, Miguel, turns out to be even more of a hell-raiser than his father—and those are some big hell-raising shoes to fill. Miguel grows up to be a rapist and a murderer. He even kills Father Renteríaia's brother and rapes the man's daughter, Renteríaia's niece Ana.
When Miguel dies, Father Renteríaia would like to withhold church services, because he hates the kid so much. The problem is he depends on money from the Páramo family to keep himself and his church going. So he keeps his head down and keeps the Páramos happy, even while he refuses to forgive the poor people who can't pay the piper…er, priest.
In the meantime, Pedro has been spending all his resources trying to locate his old childhood crush, Susana. He finally finds her living near some abandoned mines with her old dad. He offers her dad a free ranch if he'll come back to Comala and give him his daughter's hand in marriage.
The old man accepts, but Pedro has him killed after the wedding to Susana, for good measure. Susana, it turns out, is a real piece of work. She spends the whole day in bed crying and suffering. It seems she had her own true love, and it wasn't Pedro. It was a man who had died before she went back to live with her dad, and she's been crazy ever since.
In the end Susana ends up dying, and when the church bells start ringing people start coming in to town to see what's up. The gathering turns into a several-day party, which kind of ticks Pedro Páramo off. He decides to punish the town of Comala, and he does so by stopping work on his land. Since he owned all the workable land and employed everyone, this means starvation for Comala, which is why everyone ended up dead.
In the end, Abundio, the guide whose ghost left Juan Preciado in Comala in the first part of the book (and who is another of Pedro's illegitimate sons), loses his wife because he can't afford her medicine. He also can't afford to bury her, so he gets drunk and goes to the Media Luna for help. When he gets there he ends up killing Pedro with a machete. With Pedro's end, the book ends too.