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Book: “The Between” by Tananarive Due
Publishing Info: Harper Perennial, October 2021 (originally published 1995)
Where Did I Get This Book: The library!
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: When Hilton was 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, Florida, begins to receive racist hate mail from a man she once prosecuted, Hilton becomes obsessed with protecting his family. The demons lurking outside are matched by his internal terrors—macabre nightmares, more intense and disturbing than any he has ever experienced. Are these bizarre dreams the dark imaginings of a man losing his hold on sanity—or are they harbingers of terrible events to come?
As Hilton battles both the sociopath threatening to destroy his family and the even more terrifying enemy stalking his sleep, the line between reality and fantasy dissolves . . .
Chilling and utterly convincing, The Between is the haunting story of a man desperately trying to hold on to the people and life he loves as he slowly loses himself.
Review: Back in 2024 when I read Tananarive Due’s “The Reformatory”, I told myself that once I had processed the absolute magnificence of that book I would need to start reading her back catalog. And it admittedly took me awhile, probably not just because I was processing (out of sight, out of mind is basically how I function, unfortunately). But I finally kicked myself in the pants and told myself READ MORE TANANARIVE DUE, and I decided to go back to her debut novel “The Between”. Staring at the beginning is a very good place to start after all! It helped that it had been re-released a few years ago, and my local library had a copy ready to to! So as I read the story of Hilton James, a Black man who nearly drowned as a child but was saved by his grandmother, and who is now married and having horrifying nightmares AND dealing with racist threats on his family, I could tell from the jump that starting here was the right choice.
My initial thought was, as an elder Millennial horror fan, that this has similar vibes to “Final Destination”, but this came out long before that first movie made its grand entrance into the zeitgeist. So it goes to show that Due was ahead of the curve! I really enjoyed the weird and ever building tension as Hilton starts to have weirder and more distressing dreams, just as his wife (and the entire family really) is getting death threats from a stalker with a racist hatred for the family. It makes for some good muddling of the waters, in that it’s not fully clear if Hilton is really experiencing premonitions or harbingers of doom due to something supernatural, or if it’s because of a very real threat of racist violence against his family. Due taps into both the worldly and otherworldly, and I found myself just completely wound up as Hilton spirals more and more and alienates himself from those he loves as things become more and more out of control for him.
But what really stood out to me, and what I have greatly appreciated in Due’s other work, is her take on American racism and the harm it has caused and continues to cause. Setting aside the strange dreams and setting aside the lapses in memory and setting aside Hilton’s history and his potential outrunning of Death when he wasn’t supposed to, the letters and threats that he and Dede and their children receive are terrifying, vile, and, unfortunately still all too real even in the decades after this book was first published. Hilton has a lot of trauma that has been passed down through the generations as well, and the themes of grief, loss, trauma, and race all come together in ways that are incredibly powerful and absolutely heartwrenching. It’s really terrible that so few things have changed in this country since it was first published in 1995.
“The Between” was a stellar debut from a horror author that I really, really enjoy. I’m glad I went back to Tananarive Due’s first novel, as now I am going to work my way through the rest!
Rating 8: Haunting and incredibly tense, “The Between” is a strong debut from a now legendary horror author.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Between” is included on the Goodreads list “BELLETRIST”.
The Library Ladies 