The horror! The horror!

Gus Moreno combines old curses with new tech and pulls it off.

Good morning and welcome back to this newsletter about reading. It’s finally fall, the best reading season. (But winter, spring, and summer are all great times to read too.) Wherever you read your Writing About Reading today, I hope it involves a hot beverage, a warm top layer, and a view of trees.

I just finished Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré, my fourth of his and my favorite so far. I started with A Most Wanted Man a couple years ago because I stumbled on a copy in Oregon in a take-and-leave little library (aren’t those the best?), then read The Constant Gardener, then Silverview. I know, I’m doing Le Carré “ass backwards,” a friend says, by starting with his later stuff. I’ve got A Perfect Spy (Philip Roth was a huge fan) and Our Kind of Traitor waiting on my shelves, but should probably cool it on le Carré for a bit or the plots will all start to meld in my memory…

What are you reading right now? I’d love to hear it.

For Issue 22 of this thing, I want to get back to focusing on a single book I liked. And for the first time in this newsletter, it’s horror—though I don’t like pigeonholing fiction by genre, and I suspect this one in particular would appeal to many readers who don’t think of themselves as fans of horror (like me). So perhaps I shouldn’t even introduce it that way. Too late.

I saw the cover of Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us by chance when tooling around on the web site of MCD, an imprint of Farrar Straus that publishes stylish fiction by (mostly, not all) new writers, heavy on sci-fi. MCD’s first title was Borne by Jeff Vandermeer, which I adored and have mentioned in past issues. As a MCD blog post last year framed it: “Borne pioneered so much of what would become hallmarks of MCD: gleefully blending genre and literary ambition; an obsessive interest in themes of ecology and identity; mind-blowing design by Rodrigo Corral & team.”

Indeed, all the MCD titles have eye-catching covers, and that’s how I spotted This Thing Between Us. As I wrote way back about Vollmann’s books, covers matter. The dog (is that the RCA Victor dog?), the horizontal and vertical lines, the ransom-letter font of the title, all of it pulled me in. Then I clicked to read the description, and it had me at “the mysterious evil inhabiting his home smart speaker.” I ordered it.

Much is made of the haunted smart speaker in reviews of this novel and its promotional materials, since the detail itself is so interesting and creative (and, at first thought, funny). But the speaker is merely a starting plot point, not at all what the book is about. The speaker is merely how the haunting begins.

Because of the evil smart speaker, I thought this was going to be a dark humor type of sendup of modern technology and our reliance on it. But what’s so impressive and fun about This Thing Between Us is how it begins in the modern and ends up in the old world. It also goes from urban to remote rural. Thiago, our (unreliable?) narrator, moves from an apartment in Chicago to a lonely cabin in the woods of Colorado to escape what’s following him.

The book opens with the funeral of Thiago’s wife Vera. They weren’t married very long and didn’t have kids, but they were in love. Her family never thought highly of him. She died in what looks like a freak event in a train station: wrong place, wrong time. All of these details will come back around deftly.

The circumstance of Vera’s death causes a brief media frenzy that is described quickly, but wisely not dwelled on, or the novel would become something far less timeless. Thiago says: “I had to figure out how to deactivate my social media accounts because complete strangers were telling me either how sorry they felt or how angry they would be if it was their wife, and what the country should do about illegals.”

Thiago’s immediate isolation from the people who were in their shared life (mostly her family and their friends) makes us feel for him and side with him; he’s our Dante through the Hell that unfolds after Vera’s death. Thiago is also likable because he’s never a passive victim; he pretty fearlessly resolves to investigate/hunt/kill the thing that is dogging him.

I wouldn’t describe the book as scary (some horror really keeps you up at night or gives you bad dreams). It’s not cheap or schlocky in that way, more eerie and relatable. If you’ve ever lived alone in an urban apartment, this will hit home: “At night I would wake up to these loud, hammering noises coming from the front of our place, like a semitruck was being unloaded in our living room. Clanging metal. The noise would reverberate like a scream.” (Great sentence.) He hears floorboards creak, sees a silhouette on the wall, and when he gets up to investigate, nothing’s there. But this is no simple ghost story.

When Thiago and Vera first moved in, there was a door painted on one wall of the apartment and a skinned animal carcass. So a story that starts out with references to modern tech (the smart speaker is an “Itza,” sold by “Sahara Prime”; Thiago and Vera first met when he was the TaskRabbit tasker who came to set up her TV) ends up moving toward the realm of ancient Mexican curses. People and animals become possessed. A giant stone wall shows up in multiple places. Words in books transform into messages. Shades of “The Exorcist” and Stephen King’s The Outsider. (All of this could make a great film adaptation.)

The one moment that gave me goosebumps happens when Thiago is driving away late at night from a strange conversation with a cook at an isolated diner on his drive to Colorado: “In the rearview mirror I saw the red glow of the brake lights on the blacktop, and out of the dead night something scrambled, like an animal, into the red. It was crawling on all fours, except its legs were spread out on either side of its body like a spider. A spider the size of a person. Its hind legs were covered in denim, something white flapping under its belly, what could have been the cook’s apron. His eyes had completely fallen into his head, leaving two yawning gapes.”

This Thing Between Us gets kind of busy, and a little confusing, at the very end—it’s not ambiguous what happens to Thiago (don’t worry) but the explanation is murky enough that there are Reddit threads devoted to theories. All that matters to me is the feeling it leaves you with, the getting there. I don’t need a story like this to be neatly tied up with every event perfectly explained—we’re talking about curses and ghosts here, after all; it can’t all make sense.

Whether Thiago “wins” or “loses” is beside the point for me. What stays with you is the mood and set pieces. In that sense, it reminded me of three other extremely memorable novels that were spooky in sophisticated ways: Ill Will by Dan Chaon; If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub; and Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (his latest, Devil House, is also a MCD title). And of course, for timeless horror in this vein, I love the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. (Moreno winks to his influences: Thiago sees “Lovecraftian clouds” overhead as he drives through Iowa and Nebraska on his way to Colorado.)

I hope to get this feeling again. It’s a different feeling from the feeling I get from stories about aliens making contact. I’ve had people recommend Lauren Beukes to me to scratch this itch, so I’ll try her soon. What else you got?

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