This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

The blurb for This Thing Between Us is somewhat misleading. After reading it, I went into this novel expecting to be a tale about this couple who buy a possibly evil home smart speaker only to discover that said home speaker is a mere speck in the story and that the events described in the blurb don’t really happen on the page but have already come to pass by the start of the novel. This Thing Between Us opens with Vera’s funeral. Her death leaves her husband, and narrator, Thiago bereft. He refers to Vera as ‘you’, a stylistic choice that might as well appeal to other readers, but one that does zilch for me. I find this device gimmicky at the best of times and in this case it contributed nothing to the story or it did not help in making ‘you’ (aka Vera) into a fully dimensional character. Maybe this was intentional, after all, she’s dead by the start of the novel so we never truly ‘meet’ her, however, I would have still preferred it if her character had been fleshed out (flashbacks, for instance, would have helped). Anyhow, Thiago is definitely not doing so well after her death, a death which turns out was very much a public affair. The media and various political parties try to spin her death in their own favour, or try to use it to further their agendas. Thiago couldn’t care less, he just wants to be left alone. Other people’s grief and sympathies alienate him further and he finds himself increasingly aware of a sense of wrongness in his house. He eventually leaves Chicago for a remote cabin where, surprise surprise, things take a turn for the worst. Here the story definitely brought to might The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.
This is yet another horror novel that did not really affect me all that much. I wasn’t creeped out or horrified or even preoccupied. Part of it is because Thiago as a character bored me. I found him very generic and despite the majority of the narrative constituting his internal monologue, well, I did not feel as if I knew all that well. The guy is grieving for sure, but I would have liked to see more of his personality (other than he’s sort of an introvert). His voice didn’t captivate me nor was I invested in his character. While the author does dedicate a lot of time to Thiago’s grief and grieving process, he seems to lose focus of Vera. She’s very much a blank, and I wish that her death had not happened off-page prior to the beginning of the story.
The horror/paranormal angle of the story was also ultimately a letdown. As I said above, I thought this would be more about Itza, the speaker, but, turns out this was more of a supernatural/cosmic horror kind of tale. At times I was reminded of Pet Sematary (but lite). The lack of secondary characters also made the story harder to get through. So much of the narrative revolves around Thiago, a guy I was not particularly keen on. In the latter half of the novel things pick up somewhat but I found a lot of the events predictable. I was hoping it would subvert certain horror tropes but it ends up dishing out the same tired horror stuff (your protagonist has a dog? guess what happens…). The gore was eeh…not quite as gratuitous as other horror novels but nevertheless unnecessary if you ask me. Having those scenes didn’t upset me, however, they made me roll my eyes once or twice.
If you want to read this novel I recommend you check out more positive reviews. If you, like me, added this to your tbr thinking it would be about a knock-off Alexa gone bad, I suggest you look elsewhere because this book has very little to do with technology (but rather it gives us the same ol’ cosmic horror).

my rating: ★★½