This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

Published by MCD x FSG Originals on October 12, 2021

As Halloween approaches, publishers release horror novels. This one asks the reader to consider whether their Alexa might be haunted.

The protagonist of This Thing Between Us, Thiago Alvarez, has a device called Itza that is obviously Alexa by another name. Itza begins to turn itself on, answers questions it hasn’t been asked, plays bad music, orders unwanted products (including swords and sex toys), and behaves like an unwelcome guest. Mostly Itza wants to be pulled out of the wall, a phrase that only makes sense later in the novel. Returning Itza to the seller seems like a good solution, but Thiago takes more decisive action.

Perhaps it is not Itza that is haunted. Perhaps the former occupant of Thiago’s condo put a hex on the place. The floorboards squeak at night, as if someone is walking on them. There are scratching noises in the walls and spots in the home that are inexplicably cold. Yet Thiago’s worries about Itza and hexes fall to the wayside when his wife Vera is killed after being pushed down a flight of subway stairs by a fleeing criminal.

The criminal is an undocumented alien, a status that sends certain parts of the media into a frenzy while the remaining media devotes its time to covering the frenzy. Thiago writes: “My life was a series of disasters, and the aftermaths only attracted scavengers who picked the rubble for parts they could use for their own means.” Thiago doesn’t want his wife’s death to become a political football, so he says goodbye to his late wife’s mother (Diana) and moves into the woods to hide from his inability to comprehend life or death or meaning.

After that setup, the story ratchets up the creepy. Thiago finds a dog who seems sweet until, perhaps in a reincarnated form, it turns into Cujo. A wall appears in the woods and then moves into the yard. Words appear in books that shouldn’t be there, asking for release from the wall. Someone seems to be possessed. When Diana shows up for a visit, she walks into a nightmare.

This Thing Between Us is written as a communication from Thiago to Vera after her death. The purpose of the communication is revealed near the novel’s end. In the twisted logic of horror fiction, writing to a dead wife makes perfect sense.

Gus Moreno hides the ball for a while. Is this a novel about demons? Is the person wo behaves like a zombie possessed by evil spirits? Have the ghost stories that pervade Mexican culture taken root in Thiago’s family? Is Thiago delusional? The ending leaves most of the reader’s questions unanswered.

Still, the plot is really a device that allows Moreno to consider more important questions. The story asks whether people believe in the afterlife as a way of avoiding loss. At some point, Thiago is invited to join an afterlife that offers the illusion of Heaven, perhaps as a literary suggestion that Heaven is an illusion for all living people who embrace its reality.

Culture and individualism play a big part in the story, from the social schism over undocumented aliens to the cultural knowledge that informs Diana’s effort to exorcise evil from Thiago’s dwelling. Thiago is ashamed that he doesn’t speak Spanish, but Diana was born in Mexico and accepts the supernatural as a given. Thiago is antisocial, a burnout who takes odd jobs in the gig economy, part of America’s culture of loners. He resisted Vera’s preference for social connections, although Vera was also different from her friends in that she preferred museums to clubbing. Perhaps opposites attract, but Thiago feels guilty about “the times we argued because you felt you couldn’t invite people to the condo on account of me hating to be ‘on’ all the time, or me wishing you put half as much effort into taking care of yourself as you put into your job.” He regrets using his mother’s cancer as a tool to manipulate Vera into staying with him when she couldn’t deal with his failings.

I’m not a big fan of horror fiction — reality frightens me more than the supernatural — but I am a fan of insightful writing. Moreno gets into Thiago’s head to explore the universal experience of grief and loss. “In this world we struggle and bitch and fail and hurt and then weep over someone checking out of it all.” “It’s like being at a party and the one friend you knew is suddenly gone.” “When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So then there were two deaths.”

The story is bleak and the ending is both unhappy and unsatisfying, but it has the advantage of pulling no punches. Moreno blends supernatural horror with the horrible impact that loss has on survivors. I’m not sure that all of the horrific elements make any kind of unified sense, but I am sure that the story would be powerful even without its supernatural foundation.

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