This Thing Between Us Review — A Domestic Life Made Unreliable by Grief and Intrusion
The premise and reading appeal
Thiago's grief after his wife's death meets disturbing events associated with their home and an intrusive smart speaker. The technological premise sits beside bereavement and an increasingly difficult search for escape.
Choose it if you want cosmic disturbance close to domestic life rather than distant ruins. The useful distinction is that the device is an entry point, not a promise that every problem can be solved by unplugging an appliance. Consider your appetite for grief-centered horror before selecting it for a supposedly light October read.
The familiar object is an effective place to locate uncertainty
Domestic technology is designed to feel useful and unobtrusive. When an ordinary part of a home becomes difficult to interpret, the threat can reach routines a person relies on without seeming to arrive from a distant fantasy realm. Grief complicates the demand to distinguish an external intrusion from an experience nobody else shares.
Addressing the absent person changes the narration
Thiago's account is shaped by the fact that the person he most wants to speak to is no longer available to answer. Memory, complaint, affection, and anger can therefore occupy the same passage without resolving into a single dignified expression of bereavement. The voice gives grief movement rather than treating it as a fixed mood.
That intimacy helps explain why the supernatural disturbances feel invasive. They reach a life in which ordinary objects and routines already carry meanings another observer cannot fully share. The reader has to follow both the event and the emotional conditions under which it becomes legible.
The device is a threshold, not the whole explanation
A smart speaker belongs to a household while also connecting it to systems outside its walls. It is an effective place to begin a story about uncertain agency: something answers, acts, or seems to know, but that does not establish whose intention is involved.
Moreno allows the threat to exceed that initial technological frame. Readers expecting a contained haunted-appliance mystery should be prepared for changes of setting and scale. Removing one object cannot necessarily restore the stable world the protagonist wants back.
Escalation can feel like losing a narrative foothold
The book's willingness to become stranger is a strength for readers who want horror to undermine the possibility of a clean explanatory boundary. It can be frustrating for readers who invest in an early premise chiefly to learn its precise operating rules.
The more rewarding continuity lies in Thiago's need to make sense of loss. As events become harder to contain, that need remains recognizable without guaranteeing a satisfying answer. Choose it for a raw voice, disturbing bodily and domestic imagery, and a story prepared to carry grief beyond the comfort of metaphor. It is a demanding emotional read even when its supernatural plot is moving quickly.
Book details and sample: publisher or author information.
B3’s verdict: who should choose it?
Choose it for emotionally intense, destabilizing horror rather than a reassuring technology mystery. The personal loss is not incidental scenery around a clever device. A reader seeking only a neat explanation of how a supernatural object works may miss the reason the household’s uncertainty matters.
A spoiler-free discussion starting point
What makes an ordinary action feel like evidence when someone is grieving? Compare a repeated pattern with the meaning a person needs that pattern to have.
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