This Thing Between Us

As a genre, horror is expansive, consisting of many niche subgenres that give it texture, nuance, and variety. Grief horror is one such group, taking immense sorrow and loss as its driving force. In this subgenre, feelings of bereavement are not passive; rather, they manifest as intense dread and can even turn a character’s internal pain into an external threat, consolidating it into an entity that persecutes and pursues. 

The subgenre of grief horror is not new; the blurred lines between sorrow and terror underpin much of Edgar Allen Poe’s work, for example, including his famous poem “The Raven” (1845), where the haunting presence of the raven brings the narrator’s bereavement, despair, and loss of rationality into focus. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) is a more recent genre classic that explores the consequences of refusing to accept loss. The 21st century has seen several variations on the basic pattern, including Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre (2019), Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), and John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016), a novel that bears particular resemblance to This Thing Between Us in its use of cosmic horror to explore the grief of a young widower. The subgenre’s influence is also evident in film, with prominent examples including Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018).

The relationship between grief and horror is the subject of a Literary Hub article Gus Moreno wrote in 2021, entitled “How Horror Mirrors the Irrevocability of Grief.” The article’s discussion of how disorienting and identity-changing grief can be illuminates This Thing Between Us’s depiction of The Indescribable Intensity of Grief. In particular, Moreno touches on the tension between the desire to contain grief through meaning-making and the feeling that to do so is to trivialize it. 

Like Thiago after Vera’s death, Moreno describes being “hungry for meaning” after the death of his sister-in-law (Moreno, Gus. “How Horror Mirrors the Irrevocability of Grief.” LitHub, 2021). In the book, the cook’s existence (along with the wall, the beach, the banquet, and so on) suggests that there is meaning to be found, an immensely attractive possibility when one is overwhelmed by emotional chaos. At the same time, the meaning that these elements of the novel point to is not a comforting one. It can be read in various ways—for instance, as a warning about the dangers of technology—but on a more fundamental level, the fact that the meaning Thiago discovers is so horrifying points to his belief that “making sense” of Vera’s death is itself a horrifying betrayal of her memory. Likewise, in noting that the horror genre doesn’t comfort the grieving reader, Moreno observes that people who are grieving often do not want to be comforted. Moreno cites rapper DMX, who said, “Sometimes people want to feel worse, you know what I mean? They don’t always want to feel better” (Moreno). Grief makes mourners question the things they thought they knew, things on which they believed they could rely, and the horror genre also upends reality, making the impossible seem suddenly, terrifyingly, possible; this, Moreno argues, is exactly why it can be comforting.