The Between by Tananarive Due

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: Harper Collins

Genre: Psychological Horror, Thriller

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Black Characters (African American and Ghanaian) and author, Hispanic/Latino character (Puerto Rican), Character with possible Mental Illness

Takes Place in: Miami, Florida, USA

Content Warnings: Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Child Abuse, Child Death, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Gaslighting, Homophobia, Mental Illness, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault mentioned, Stalking, Slurs, Suicidal thoughts, Verbal/Emotional Abuse (Highlight to view)

Blurb:

When Hilton was just a boy, his grandmother sacrificed her life to save him from drowning. Thirty years later, he begins to suspect that he was never meant to survive that accident, and that dark forces are working to rectify that mistake. When Hilton's wife, the only elected African-American judge in Dade County, FL, begins to receive racist hate mail, he becomes obsessed with protecting his family. Soon, however, he begins to have horrible nightmares, more intense and disturbing than any he has ever experienced. Are the strange dreams trying to tell him something? His sense of reality begins to slip away as he battles both the psychotic threatening to destroy his family and the even more terrifying enemy stalking his sleep. Chilling and utterly convincing, The Between follows the struggles of a man desperately trying to hold on to the people and life he loves, but may have already lost. The compelling plot holds readers in suspense until the final, profound moment of resolution.

I admit, I'm a huge Tananarive Due fan. I love her books, I love her academic work, I love reading her tweets, and I especially love how she's always willing to share her wisdom and encourage other writers. When I was watching Black horror films for my Horror Noire timeline and Morbidly Beautiful review Due was kind enough to engage with me on Twitter and offer movie recommendations, insights, and feedback for my articles. Here was this amazing author who I admired so much not only chatting with me about our shared love of horror, but taking the time to help me out! If I ever get the chance to meet her in person, I'd probably faint. Needless to say, trying to pick a book to review by one of the most influential Black horror authors out there was a daunting task. Should I write about one of her best-known novels, My Soul to Keep from the popular African Immortals series? Or should I review my personal favorite, The Good House (which I've been known to throw at random friends and family members, insisting they read it)? After much back and forth, I finally decided I should start at the beginning and shine the spotlight on her very first novel which doesn't get nearly as much recognition as it deserves: The Between. This award-winning psychological thriller stars family man Hilton as he loses his grasp on reality while watching his perfect life fall apart after his wife, Dede, receives a racist death threat at her job. In addition to being a truly creepy piece of speculative fiction, it's also nice to see such a strong, loving, successful black family dealing with issues like code-switching in a mostly white neighborhood, the Black community's views on homosexuality and mental illness, and the differences in culture between Africans and Black Americans.

Before diving into the plot of Due's very first novel, let's have a quick physics lesson because I can't review a sci-fi story without at least a little bit of science. Many of you may already be familiar with the many-worlds theory: an interpretation of quantum physics which essentially states that everything that could have possibly happened, but did not, has occurred in a different, alternate timeline, creating a vast multiverse where universes branch into more universes with each possible outcome. For example, flipping a coin would create two separate universes, one where it lands on heads and another where it lands on tails. Some of these universes would be nearly identical to our own, like the two timelines seen in the movie Sliding Doors, while others would hardly be recognizable, like the alternate history in The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick where the allies lose WWII, or the two-dimensional world from Edwin Abbott Abbott's satirical novella, Flatland. However, we are only capable of perceiving the universe that we're currently in. That's the main, overly simplified, gist of it anyway. Here's a great video that further explains this complex concept in an easy to understand way. Now you can impress your friends with your physics knowledge!

And half of the alternate universes in existence are caused by Barry Allen trying to change the timeline.

The many-worlds theory is especially popular with science and speculative fiction writers and shows up in everything from novels (Mid-World from Stephen King's Dark Tower series) and comics (the Bizarro World in Superman) to films (Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse) and TV shows (Star Trek's Mirror Universe). The Between differs from most of these examples because, in true Schrödinger's cat fashion, a multiverse may or may not play an important role in the book, and it all starts when Hilton's grandmother dies the first time. Seven-year old Hilton James discovers his Nana's cold, dead body on the kitchen floor and runs to get help, only to return and discover she's alive and well. Her second, and final, death occurs when she drowns trying to save him. Struggling with survivor's guilt, Hilton becomes obsessed with saving everyone and grows up to run a rehab clinic for low-income people suffering from drug addiction. While a noble calling, spending his every waking moment helping the less fortunate at the expense of him family puts a serious strain on Hilton's relationship with his wife, Dede, whose jealousy causes her to suspect the worst. Worse still, Hilton is plagued by morbid nightmares in which a voice asks him "How many times do you think you can die?" Believing "we're always closest to death when we sleep" the nightmares result in somniphobia and severe insomnia. Marriage counseling improves his relationship with his wife, and hypnotherapy helps Hilton sleep, but his nightmares soon resurface with a vengeance after Dede receives a racist, threatening letter shortly after being elected as a judge. Seemingly prophetic dreams full of his Nana's decaying corpse, his children dying, and his own, mutilated body telling him he's running out of time plague Hilton until he starts staying up all night, wandering the house, rather than returning to his cadaver-filled dream land. Unsurprisingly, Hilton's mental health takes a turn for the worse.

Seemingly unsatisfied with simply haunting Hilton's nightmares, portents of death start appearing to him during the day. After waking up with a sense of dread, Hilton insists the family go to church, only to be met with a new preacher ranting about the water of life from Revelations and meeting Jesus when you face eternity. Cheerful! The day gets worse when his young son, Jamil, is traumatized after witnessing some older boys kill a duckling. Then, Hilton accidentally rear-ends a hearse because the universe is not fucking around with the foreboding omens. A few days later, his adolescent daughter, Kaya, has her first period which Hilton's commemorates by taking her to the hospital to meet one of his clients, Antoinette, a teenage girl dying of AIDS. I know I'm not a parent, but I feel like reminding your child of their own impending mortality is probably not the best way to celebrate their menarche. And just to make sure Hilton really gets it, because Death doesn't do subtle, they're stopped by a funeral procession on their way back from seeing Antoinette. Did I mention it's raining? Of course it's raining. I'm surprised a murder of crows didn't fly overhead and blot out the sun while chanting "doooooooom". No wonder Hilton becomes convinced Death is stalking him. The symbolism may seem heavy handed, and in the hands of a less talented writer would've come off as cheesy, but in Due's case it works incredibly well to emphasize the depths of Hilton's paranoia and his loosening grip on reality and set up two equally creepy explanations for what's happening.

What I imagined Death doing throughout the book

It's implied that Hilton is a "traveler", someone with the ability to escape death and bad decisions by traveling through "doorways" from his current reality to one with a more favorable outcome. It's how he brought Nana back to life and survived drowning as a child. He does it again when he rear-ends the hearse to save his family. Of course, not every timeline he jumps into is exactly identical. Hilton begins to notice more and more inconsistencies in his everyday life, from events that repeat themselves to encounters that seemingly never occurred no matter how clearly he remembers them and even visions of deaths that never happened. On top of this, you can only cheat the system for so long before you get caught. Some unknown force, sensing that Hilton isn't supposed to be alive, is making subtle alterations to the timeline to "correct" this. Between his menacing nightmares and threatening letters that continue to arrive at Dede's office, and eventually their home, Hilton's concern for his family's safety warps into full blown paranoia. Even after putting his children under lockdown, buying a rifle, security lighting, and a guard dog, Hilton continues to see danger around every corner, thanks in no small part to his lack of sleep. He goes from his normal calm and sensitive self to a scared, angry man who lashes out at his family and friends.

Hilton may see signs that Death is lurking around every corner, but the rest of his family isn't making the same connection between a dead duckling and their patriarch's distracted driving. Maybe something supernatural is going on and the universe is trying to send the poor man a warning about abusing the natural order of things, but there's also a strong argument to be made that Hilton is merely suffering from Apophenia, assigning meaning to unrelated coincidences. Apophenia is also a major symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, along with a fear that someone or something is out to get you, an inability to tell what is and isn't real, a voice (or voices) in your head, and major changes to mood and sleeping habits, all of which Hilton has started to display. Those prone to schizophrenia can have a psychotic episode triggered by a stressful life event, like, say, having a racist stalker sending threatening letters to your wife.

The Between is set in the 90's, but all my memories of that particular decade seem to be either Pokémon or Harry Potter related and I don't really remember what we were wearing back then. So I just put Hilton and his daughter in 90's sitcom clothes and called it a day.  

As we watch Hilton's mind unravel as he desperately tries to prevent some horrible, unknown disaster he's convinced will happen, there's a strong sense of urgency and dread. However, it's unclear if supernatural forces are at work and Hilton is the only person who can see the truth, or if he really is just paranoid and his visions are a result of his fears made manifest by mental illness. Are his lapses in memory and reoccurring nightmares a result of a mental illness combined with guilt, or some sort of supernatural force?  Is the racist stalker leaving poison pen letters for his wife the only thing threatening Hilton's family, or is Death playing a drawn out game of Final Destination? Will he lose everything due to a curse, or his own actions? With the line between dreams and the real world becoming more and more blurred, it's difficult for the reader to determine how much of what happens is in Hilton's head, and whose version of reality is the truth until the very end. Hilton is not the most reliable of narrators, making it difficult to determine whether or not something supernatural is going on, but like The Turn of the Screw, not knowing if it's the narrator's sanity slippage or the work of spirits is part of the appeal and both possibilities are equally terrifying. Due hit the ground running with her very first novel and her fiction has only gotten better from there.