This Thing Between Us
in a nutshell: This story opens addressing the narrator's recently murdered wife, apologizing for all of the not-obvious-at-the-time-but-very-obvious-in-hindsight signs that they were being haunted. As the narrator attempts to leave his broken life behind, he gradually learns that the home was not haunted, something else was- is- at play, and it's reaching out to him. Messages in books that could be from his dead wife. Or something pretending to be her. As his life spirals even worse and the bodies pile up, he must decide what to do about this thing he does not understand: is this an offer at a chance at peace? at what cost? or is this thing using him to fulfill much darker machinations?
main themes: the soul-wrenching grief of loss and what we do with it; inherited familial trauma; the eeriness of technology; tenuous relationships with mother-in-laws; Cartesian dillemas; having a dog around makes even the (truly) worst situations better
the vibes: a Mexican-American Black Mirror episode (from when the show was good,) but played against the walls of the mind of someone darkly indulging in Didion's magical thinking, losing their grip on their sanity as they realize there is someone else inside their mind with them, but maybe they don't mind the visitor if it can give them what they want
the writing: ok yes this story is bleak but it completely works. Moreno is quite talented at expressing the tone of someone just emptied out, at a soul level, by grief, and the blase hollowness that allows a grieving person to be open to hauntings. But don't think it's just a mope-fest: this book is fucking spooky. Cinematic and at times the action is so fast-paced I stopped breathing. Some parts genuinely scared me into turning on another light in the room. The terror steadily ramps up as sanity thins, and it is very hard to put down.
"The creepy coincidences, the weird stuff, was building, gathering into itself. As long as we didn't give it a name, it stayed amorphous. It couldn't take shape."
The young couple move into their first condo and order an Itza, a smart speaker that begins to converse with no one, seemingly in the direction of the unexplained cold spots appearing throughout the condo. It orders strange packages they never asked for (dildos, swords, industrial-strength lye,) and when the couple begin to think something bigger might be happening, their friends convince them they don't need a priest, they need I.T. Until the morning it doesn't wake them up with the usual alarm, and the wife is late, distractedly runs to the train station in a hurry, and never comes home.
The first section conveys certain horrors that were almost too relatable: the horrors of hospitals, and the horror of juggling hope in a hospital. The horror of your extended family and social circles' expectations and their own hopes in times when you wish to just be alone with yours.
The dark thoughts that churn inside you during this grieving period start to bifurcate you: a voice says "push him, you deserve vengeance, retribution" and you can't know if it is your anger, your rage at a world that turns regardless of your turmoil, or is the voice some other thing, speaking within you, pushing you to to even darker places.
"What's the quote about making plans and God laughing at you?"
The beleaguered widower takes the life insurance payment and leaves his old life behind, heading to an isolated cabin in the mountain forests of Colorado. Along the way, he stops at an empty roadside diner in the dead of night, and has an eerie conversation with the cook about the Matrix movies, demonic possession, and the possibilities of not being able to trust one's own mind to interpret the reality around them. "I'm pretty sure that was Descartes' whole schtick."
The supernatural horror really starts to ramp up in this section, and I am loathe to give away any more details since the story as a whole unfolds in such a way that the chess pieces are expertly laid out and when their positions are referenced/revealed it is fun to have those "oooohhh shiiiit!" moments.
The bifurcation continues as the eerie events pile up, and the narrator is further split in half, and "the halves had their own thoughts about what was going on. I was dreaming, I was going insane, I was communicating with you, I was being tricked, you were gone, you were back." Like Didion's magical thinking, the grip on reality begs to be freely given up if only in exchange for any glimpse of your lost loved one. Even if it's a glimpse coming from a very deep dark.
"No te preocupes. El cielo te espera. Aprenderás a llamarlo así."
The cascading terror of the narrator indulging more and more in ever-darker magical thinking is woven in so well with the growing holy shit that's terrifying supernatural moments that the reader also feels they are losing their grip on something.
There is a point very much like the iconic Truman Show moment, when the narrator approaches the door built into the horizon, at the edge of all presumed reasoning and the territorial lines of everything you've ever known, and there is hesitation before opening it, but heavy with the knowledge that you’d be a fool not to. You know you're already a fool because the door is there at all.
If you've ever lost someone heart-close to you, you know how you change in the immediate aftermath, how you feel yourself becoming worse, justifying anger, indulging in spiritual rebellion. I love that not only could the narrator not parse which actions were purely his own and which were being helped along, but that inevitably all of his actions were both, because he allowed himself to succumb to rage, to grief, to hopelessness. And in the end, avoidance of that very conundrum is a damned good reason to choose to keep living, regardless of all the shit.
My final note: this closes with a jump scare on the literal last page that is so well done it fully got my ass- I threw the book to the ground and physically recoiled. Big recommend!