Gus Moreno

A widower battles his grief, rage, and the mysterious evil inhabiting his home smart speaker, in this mesmerizing horror thriller from Gus Moreno. It was Vera’s idea to buy the Itza. The “world’s most advanced smart speaker!” didn’t interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room. It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago’s world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife’s death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room . . . The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world. A bold, original horror novel about grief, loneliness and the oppressive intimacy of technology, This Thing Between Us marks the arrival of a spectacular new talent.

A Novel

This Thing Between Us

Rebecca Lum

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we'd end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we're going to hell, we'll burn forever, and we'll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the after-life we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death. You believed that once a person died the party was over, so you’d just be sitting in an empty space, in a self-imposed slumber. But then I’d die expecting to find you, spending all my time traversing an afterlife landscape that I make up as I go along, searching, when all I’d want would be to sit in that darkness with you, blind and mute and floating in the ink like a womb. I’m afraid I’ll die wrong. The sperm that swims down the wrong fallopian tube. I don’t want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filer it.

Alli

…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. 

At night the rooms felt sharp, lifeless, and if they were flled with anything it was that invisible hostility a person felt in their room after waking up from a bad dream.

Im afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we‘d end up. … That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death. 

I don't want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filter it.

Elizabeth

People cannot bear to admit there are channels of the human experience that are closed off to them. That they’ll never know. 

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