By GUS MORENO (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 2021)
The official synopsis for this novel is somewhat misleading, describing a story in which “A widower battles grief, rage and the mysterious evil inhabiting his home smart speaker.” The first part of that statement is an accurate description of THIS THING BETWEEN US, but the second constitutes only a small portion.
The novel begins with first person narrator Thiago, a working class Chicagoan, at the funeral of his recently deceased wife Vera. The literary but still quite readable prose is addressed directly to Vera, a.k.a. “You,” and, as is the style nowadays, riddled with pop culture references (“In the movies, if every guy in an indie romance wanted a manic pixie dream girl, then you were my Sarah Conner girl”) that continue through the remainder of the novel.
“In the movies, if every guy in an indie romance wanted a manic pixie dream girl, then you were my Sarah Conner girl.”
The horrors-of-modern-technology angle delineated by the synopsis is provided by Itza, a smart speaker synched to all the devices in Thiago and Vera’s condo that “made me think of HAL from 2001, down to her dulcet voice” (the first of several 2001 references). It quickly becomes clear that Itza is haunted and/or possessed when the device begins ordering errant packages (such as a pink dildo) and playing odd songs. Then we get the circumstances of Vera’s death, which occurs on a subway platform at the hands of a gangbanger performing an initiation ritual.
Amid Thiago’s convincingly described grief (the novel was written, as the “Acknowledgments” section informs us, to deal with the author’s own grief, although he doesn’t go into particulars) comes a flood of unwanted media attention, apparently “the millennial version of those cultures that exhumed a dead person’s corpse and paraded it through the streets.” Worse, Itza begins “malfunctioning” in a most disturbing manner, leading Thiago to destroy the device.
…setting up a PET SEMATERY-esque angle at odds with the grief-centered horror of what came before
Thiago’s ultimate solution is to relocate to a cabin in Colorado. There he comes into contact with a homeless saint bernard and discovers an odd rock structure that resembles “a monolith on the moon.” The dog is unexpectedly killed and Thiago buries it in the area, only to have it reappear in different form, suggesting that the entity animating Itza has found a new vessel, and setting up a PET SEMATERY-esque angle at odds with the grief-centered horror of what came before. But then in the book’s final third things take an entirely different turn, with Thiago becoming convinced he sees personal messages in the books he’s reading and the proceedings becoming increasingly irrational as memory, hallucination and “reality” increasingly overlap, suggesting (but not confirming) that the story may be occurring on a mental plane.
Gus Moreno’s David-Searcy-meets-Stephen-King-meets-Philip-K.-Dick aesthetic won’t be appreciated by everyone, but I say it makes for an invigorating reading experience. The novel’s grief-centered portions, however, with their reality-based sense of cosmic upset, do somewhat overpower the others.
Gus Moreno’s David-Searcy-meets-Stephen-King-meets-Philip-K.-Dick aesthetic won’t be appreciated by everyone, but I say it makes for an invigorating reading experience.