The Between by Tananarive Due
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An African American Family Horror Novel Thirty-eight-year-old Hilton James is productive and caring, giving back to his community by effectively running Miami New Day, a hospital for recovering addicts. His beloved wife Dede has just been elected the first African American judge in Dade County, and they have two cute and intelligent children, Kaya and Jamil. But all is not well. Dede has started receiving ugly racist death threats, and Hilton has started having vivid nightmares he can’t remember but that make him wake up screaming and sweaty and reluctant to sleep. Still more. Weird daily life discontinuities start popping up, as when, for instance, Hilton realizes that although the Dolphins were beating the Colts 14-0 at halftime, they ended up losing while scoring only thirteen points, or as when a doctor in his hospital brings him some patient forms to fill out that Hilton knows he just filled out. Is Hilton suffering from a sleep disorder? Or becoming schizophrenic? Or being haunted by ghosts? Or slipping between his real world and other alternate realities? Or being persecuted by a white racist military-veteran who starts taking over his dreams? Can Hilton’s psychiatrist friend Dr. Raoul A. Puerta help him, or is his approach too scientific and by the (consensus reality) book for what ails him? Tanarive Due’s The Between (1995) hooks us from the intense prologue depicting key events from Hilton’s boyhood: “Hilton was seven when his grandmother died, and it was a bad time. But it was worse when she died again.” The main action of the novel in the present alternates past tense waking action chapters with present tense nightmare ones. As the vivid and horrifying nightmares start leaking into or informing the waking action, and as Hilton continues to be unable to remember anything from them upon waking, Due creates a powerful ironic suspense—which unfortunately also makes Hilton’s inability to remember his dreams begin to feel contrived and frustrating. The novel kinda reads like a Stephen King story, starting out slow in terms of the supernatural and building up verisimilitude with very human characters and situations so we’ll get more scared when the scary supernatural stuff really gets going. Because Hilton and his family feel so real and appealing, the novel becomes increasingly painful as he becomes increasingly unable to control his nightmares, and his waking behavior at work and at home starts distressing his staff and family. (Perhaps because the nightmare chapters start hinting at what’s happening to Hilton, I started losing patience with his obtuse if not stupid behavior in the waking world.) As in many Stephen King novels, the supernatural is scarier in this one before we learn what’s going on with it. And after all, as is also often the case with Stephen King, the real horror is family horror—when family members change strangely or hurt us or seem like to die, etc. The audiobook version—capably read by Kevin Kenerly—features an interesting 2021 preface by Due, about how she got started writing speculative fiction as a black woman, how she published her first story—this novel—how she was inspired to write what she knew and not to pretend to understand things she didn’t know by Hurricane Andrew (1992), her mother (interest in monsters), Stephen King (horror), Anne Rice (unwitting advice), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), and how back in 1995 she thought at first that maybe having a white racist villain wouldn’t wear well after civil rights activists like her parents had apparently achieved what they’d set out to achieve—only to watch the Oklahoma bombing, the election of Trump, the January 6 insurrection, and so on. I did like this early African American horror novel, especially things like White or Black Jesuses, the dark mocha complexion of Dede and the red-clay brown of Hilton’s, and the racism still alive and well in America) and will read more books by Due. View all my reviews
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