[3][4] Tobar is the author of The Tattooed Soldier, a novel set in the impoverished immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the weeks before the riots, and in Guatemala during the years of military dictatorship there.

In October 2014, he published an official account titled Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free.

[8] His 2020 novel The Last Great Road Bum is a fictionalized account of the life of Joe Sanderson, an adventurer from Urbana, Illinois, who was one of two Americans to die fighting with leftist rebels in El Salvador.

Eric Vázquez in "Interrogative Justice in Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier" writes of it: "Much of this scholarship stresses the novel's pertinence to a demand for the [US] representation of the Central American diaspora.

For critic and novelist Arturo Arias, the novel and its characters express the null space of Central American cultural and social identity within US multiculturalism."