The further I progress through the Books of Horror Go To List, the horror novels that keep coming up for discussion in the Books of Horror Facebook group, the more I appreciate just how diverse it is. Some of these novels feature relatively traditional takes on horror, like 'The Shuddering', 'The Exorcist's House' and, I guess, 'The Haunted Forest Tour'. Others dip into modern extreme horror, like 'Woom', 'The Slob' and 'No One Rides for Free'. However, some do something utterly different with the horror genre, like 'Tampa', 'Tender is the Flesh' and 'Cows'. This fits in the third category, as a book that isn't truly horror in any traditional sense and could fairly be categorised as general fiction, but also functions perfectly well as horror.

'This Thing Between Us' is death. The protagonist of the story, Thiago Alvarez, is a young husband who's just lost his wife Vera to a senseless accident and he's submerged in grief. The book starts at her funeral and, for the whole of the first part and much of the remaining three, it's told from his perspective talking to her, even though she's no longer there. There is mention at one point of an actual letter that he's written to her, but this isn't epistolary, it's more stream of consciousness, a man who's lost the love of his life but can't bring himself to accept it, so continues to talk to her as if she's still there.

Both of them come from Mexican families and the book occasionally and appropriately dips into Spanish, but with the caveat that Thiago isn't remotely fluent. There's a point at which he has to interview an old Mexican lady, a former tenant of the apartment he currently lives in, and he has little understanding of what she's trying to tell him because he doesn't have enough Spanish for that. Eventually, of course, he figures it out because of what's happening to him, but that doesn't mean that either he or we learn why. It appears that she's cursed the apartment for reasons that remain unexplained, at least in English, and he and Vera are paying the price.

Or, of course, none of it's real and his grief is merely so strong that it's manifesting itself in weird ways that a seriously good therapist might be able to help him with. That's up to us to decide and I really can't say which way I'd go. I've never lost a spouse, let alone at a scary young age soon into a new marriage, but I have lost grandparents, a parent, a host of relatives, friends and others who have meant a great deal to me. Some of those were frustratingly young and two in particular took their own lives. It's one thing to lose a ninety-year-old grandparent who's suffering from terminal disease. It's another entirely to lose a thirty-year-old friend who never gave any indication that he would commit suicide. We grieve both, but there's abiding guilt with the latter. Is there something we missed, that we could have done differently or more to help avoid such an extreme solution to a problem we somehow knew nothing about?

It's clear that Thiago bears no responsibility for what happened to Vera, but he has a serious case of survivor's guilt. He didn't set an alarm for her one day, she woke up late and so had to take the subway to work. It was there that a thief bumped into her and accidentally knocked her down the stairs where she banged her head and fell into a coma from which she never woke up. We wouldn't blame him, but he blames himself, even though there's a growing sense that something else is in play that might have somehow been behind all of it.

For a start, there's Itza. The alarm that Thiago didn't set was on an Itza, a Sahara smartspeaker in the vein of Amazon's Alexa. And their Itza has been misbehaving. It's connected to everything, as such things often are nowadays; to the degree that it has their bank details to make purchases. It makes a lot of purchases, many of which they don't ask it to make. There's a whole scene where it hilariously only answers Thiago's questions in the form of pop culture quotes like "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." It has power over them because they've given it that power, so making this another look at the horror that emerges from use of new technology in stories that run from 'Frankenstein' to 'Ringu'.

Because this book was released as recently as 2021, there's a lot more current tech wrapped up in the ramifications of this horror. For instance, to Thiago, the horror is in the loss of his wife, but an incident that would remain personal doesn't in our modern age, especially when it turns out that the thief who bumped Vera on the subway was an illegal immigrant. The ensuing media circus isn't the focus and it's always kept at a distance, as if seen through a haze, but everyone seems to react to Vera's death. It's not just Thiago and it's not just family, friends or work colleagues. It's also the media whipping up a frenzy, strangers hurling out their views on social media, even presidential candidates bringing their own agendas into someone else's story.

And so Thiago moves from inner city Chicago to a cabin in the mountains of Colorado, via what we can only see as a highway café of the damned, to steal a song title from the Austin Lounge Lizards. He wants to hide from it all, to face his grief on his own, but it won't go away and it manifests in an array of surreal and fantastic ways. He acquires a dog, a St. Bernard he calls Wilford Brimley that quickly dies but returns to life again. He discovers a wall on his property that moves. Books fly off his shelves, landing on pages that send him messages. Something wants him to do something and it's happy to use Vera's death to get its way.

Part I all takes place in Chicago and it's all about grief, with that one sidebar of the former tenant, a hoarder lady who might have cursed the apartment when she was forced out. Part II involves the drive to Colorado and it's when things start to get surreal, with the creepy cook/spider creature in the café on the way, the resurrected dog and the moving wall and all the rest of it. As we shift into Part III and Part IV, things becomes an outpouring of grief that could have been written by Hunter S. Thompson. It's weird, it's trippy and it's so personal that it hurts.

There's a lot that we can read into this, beyond the obvious conversation about whether Thiago is merely caught up in someone else's broadly aimed revenge scheme or not. I'm not convinced that I understood half of where it ends up, the final chapter being something that many might see as a cheat or a disappointment. I found the depth of Thiago's grief to be acutely involving and how the impact of that escalates heartrendingly deep. I can't remember another book that covered grief in such a searing fashion and, whatever it means, I'm not going to soon forget it. ~~ Hal C F Astell