The Between: A Novel

By Tananarive Due

“An extraordinary work of humane imagination . . . call it magic realism with soul.”—Locus

“Finely honed . . . always engages and frequently surprises.”—New York Times Book Review

A man risks his soul and his sanity to save his family from malevolent forces in this brilliant novel of horror and the supernatural from the award-winning pioneer of speculative fiction and author of the classic My Soul to Keep. 

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. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063221277

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com. 

Book preview

Preface

In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which left miles of devastation in my home of south Florida, I got an idea for a novel called The Between: What if you didn’t die when you were supposed to die? What if you woke up in a different reality after you went to sleep?

When I started writing The Between, I had never published even a short story (although I’d sold one to a magazine that promptly went out of business before the story published). I had started writing novels but had never finished one as an adult, fresh out of writing classes at Northwestern University and with an MA in English Literature from the University of Leeds in England.

I was working as a reporter for the Miami Herald where I’d served as an intern, on and off, since I was fifteen. But my deepest dream was to be a novelist, which I’d confessed to a co-worker during a summer internship. He got a wistful look and said, I used to want to be a writer.

Until that point, I’d never met anyone who’d shared my dream and given up. After that chilling glimpse at the Dream Abandoned, I worked on short stories and unfinished novels while I worked as a journalist. I submitted. I got rejected. I remembered my high school English teacher, Mrs. Estaver, told me, In order to be a writer, you must wallpaper your wall with rejection slips. I tried to keep the faith.

Then came the hurricane.

Even without that terrifying sense of the world turned upside down—with severe damage to the homes of my parents, grandmother, and aunt and high winds that had transformed the neighborhood I’d grown up in into what looked like a war zone—I had to struggle to find my true voice as an author.

Although I loved horror, I wasn’t writing horror then. And sometime between elementary school and graduate school, my characters had transformed from young Black characters on fantastic and futuristic adventures to white characters having quiet epiphanies. I had wonderful writing teachers in college, but somehow with all of that exposure to canon, I had lost track of my own voice and was imitating writers whose stories were nothing like the ones hidden in my heart.

I was a young Black woman raised by two civil rights activists—attorney John Due and Patricia Stephens Due—and I had grown up in the newly integrated suburbs of Miami-Dade County. I had never seen my life reflected in fiction; I felt like an imposter when I tried to write Black rural or city characters. I often wish I had discovered the writing of Octavia E. Butler sooner, but I had not. Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely.

Then I discovered Mama Day by Gloria Naylor—finally, a book by a highly respected Black woman writer with metaphysical themes! Mama Day helped nudge me past my fear that I could not be a respected writer, especially as a Black writer, if I wrote about the supernatural.

During this time, I also interviewed Anne Rice for my newspaper, since she was scheduled to appear at the Miami Book Fair International. I read one of the novels in her Vampire Chronicles series to prepare, and I also found an article about her in a highly respected magazine suggesting that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires.

My worst fear realized! During that telephone interview, I asked Rice how she responded to criticism like this and then listened carefully for her answer—not for my readers, but for me.

Rice actually laughed. That used to bother me, she said, but my books are taught in universities. Then she explained that by writing about the supernatural, she was liberated to discuss big themes like life, death, and love. Touché.

Between Hurricane Andrew, Mama Day, and Anne Rice’s (unwitting) advice, I wrote The Between in nine months, looking past my own fears as a writer to follow my true passions. My protagonist, Hilton James, is a Black man who lives in the suburbs. His family reminded me of my own.

I motivated myself to finish my book quickly by submitting it in a screenwriting contest. Ironically, although I’m a professional screenwriter now, I had no true interest in screenwriting back then—the contest accepted novels, and I needed a deadline.

Instead of going Rollerblading on South Beach every day after work, I went home to write. Instead of watching TV, I was busy writing, so busy that I didn’t notice my cable had been shut off. I wrote in what I call the creases—quiet moments in the morning. At lunchtime. At night. Even if it was just a sentence a day.

Once I finished it, I thought The Between was the best thing I’d ever written, but I didn’t know if there would be a market for it. The publishing industry was in the midst of the Terry McMillan renaissance, when so many Black authors were getting opportunities because of McMillan’s phenomenal success with Waiting to Exhale, but I’d never seen another horror novel by a Black writer at the time. (There are many now.)

Then came the rejections. I didn’t win the screenwriting contest. The first mega agent I sent it to (through a coworker at the newspaper) rejected it too.

After a grand total of two rejections, I assumed The Between was another learning project, so I put it in a drawer and began working on my next novel about a woman who discovers that her husband is a 500-year-old immortal: My Soul to Keep.

But something didn’t feel right. I was getting panic attacks. I felt on the brink of depression. Although I had a steady writing practice, my unconscious mind knew that I was letting myself down by not trying harder to sell The Between.

Maybe a year after I’d put The Between in a drawer, I met Miami literary agent Janell Agyeman of Marie Brown Associates and sent it to her. She loved it. She sent it to a HarperCollins editor, Paternelle van Arsdale, who wanted to buy it.

After never having published a professional short story, I sold my first novel in two weeks for more than my annual salary. And so my career as an author began.

* * *

My love affair with horror began with my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who loved horror movies and gave me my first Stephen King novel, The Shining, when I turned sixteen. After her death in 2012, I began to understand that her love for horror wasn’t just the rollercoaster ride of imaginary frights I enjoyed as a child—I believe my mother used horror to address her trauma after Jim Crow and her civil rights activism.

In 1960, when she was only twenty years old, my mother led a peaceful march of Florida A&M students in Tallahassee—and a police officer recognized her, said I want you! and threw a tear gas cannister in her face. From that time on until the day she died, my mother often wore dark glasses, even indoors, because she suffered from a sensitivity to light.

As I said in the documentary I executive produced for Shudder, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, "Black History is Black Horror."

In retrospect, it’s only natural that my mother was drawn to stories of vampires, monsters, and demons. Now that I have suffered the trauma of the loss of my mother, I better understand the allure of seeing monstrosity visualized on screen: it fits the wounds just right.

Black Horror has existed in the United States since the first narratives written by the enslaved. It existed when W. E. B. DuBois wrote his post-apocalyptic short story The Comet in 1920, where the only two survivors were a Black man and a white woman. Black Horror gained popularity in cinema with films like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which had a Black lead (Duane Jones), Blaxploitation era films like Blacula (directed by William Crain), and the ’90s Renaissance that brought us films like Tales from the Hood (Rusty Cundieff), Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons), and Beloved (directed by Jonathan Demme but adapted from Toni Morrison).

But in 2017, Oscar winner Jordan Peele’s Get Out brought tremendous visibility to Black Horror, especially the notion of Racism itself as the monster. Because of Peele’s work, Black Horror creators are much more in demand in Hollywood—including me.

At this writing, I am working on a pilot for a proposed series based on The Between. How far will it get? I don’t know. But it’s the first time The Between has been optioned since its publication in 1995, and it’s one of several projects I’m working on during this very exciting Black Horror era.

In The Between, Racism is the monster too. It’s a story of a near-death experience gone wrong, but the vessel of antagonism is a white supremacist.

When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too old fashioned. I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true.

Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted.

Like Hilton James, none of us knows what world we will face when we open our eyes each morning. Will our lives have taken turns for the better? Or turns for the worse? But while Black Horror is a much more recognized and appreciated subgenre than it was when I wrote this novel, the social fears that helped create it are still alive and well.

Some monsters never die.

—TANANARIVE DUE

APRIL 5, 2021

Prologue

1963

Hilton was seven when his grandmother died, and it was a bad time. But it was worse when she died again.

Hilton called her Nana, but her real name was Eunice Kelly. She raised Hilton by herself in rural Florida, in Belle Glade, which was forty miles from Palm Beach’s rich white folks who lived like characters in a storybook. They shared a two-room house with a rusty tin roof on a road named for Frederick Douglass. The road wasn’t paved, and the stones hurt Hilton’s tender feet whenever he walked barefoot. Douglass Road was bounded by tomato fields behind an old barbed wire fence Nana told him never to touch because he might get something she called tetanus, and they couldn’t afford a doctor. Hilton knew they were poor, but he never felt deprived because he had everything he wanted. Even as young as he was, Hilton understood the difference.

Nana had been a migrant worker for years, so she had muscles like a man on her shoulders and forearms. Nana always saved her money, and she played the organ for pay at the church the monied blacks attended across town, so she hadn’t harvested sugarcane or picked string beans alongside the Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans in a long time.

Hilton worshipped her. She was his whole world. He didn’t know anything about his parents except that they were gone, and he didn’t miss them. He didn’t think it was fair to his friends that they had mamas and daddies instead of a Nana.

Nana always said she didn’t intend for Hilton to end up in the fields, that there were bigger things in store for him, so she sent him to school instead. She’d taught him to read before he ever walked through the doorway of the colored school a half mile away. And it was when he came home from school on a hot May afternoon that his life was changed forever.

He found Nana sprawled across her clean-swept kitchen floor, eyes closed, a white scarf wrapped around her head. She wasn’t moving, and not a sound came from her. Hilton didn’t panic just yet because Nana was old and sometimes fainted from heat when she tried to act younger, so he knelt beside her and shook her, calling her name. That worked by itself sometimes. Otherwise, he’d need to find her salts. But when he touched her forearm, he drew his hand away with a cry. Even with the humidity in the little house and the steam from pots boiling over on top of the stove, their lids bouncing like angry demons, Nana’s flesh felt as cold as just-drawn well water. As cold as December. He’d never touched a person who felt that way, and even as a child he knew only dead people turned cold like that.

Hilton stumbled to his feet and ran crying outside to find a grown-up who could help. He was only half seeing because of his tears, banging on door after door on Douglass Road, yelling through the screens, and finding no one home. After each door, his sobs rose higher and his throat closed up a little more tightly until he could barely breathe. It was as though everyone were simply gone now, and no one was left but him. He felt like he’d tried a hundred houses, and all he’d found was barking dogs. The barking and running made him feel dizzy. He could hardly catch his breath anymore, like he would die himself.

In truth, there were only six houses on Douglass Road. The last belonged to Zeke Higgs, a Korean War veteran angry with middle age, angry with white folks, and whom no child with sense would bother on any other day because he kept a switch by his door. Zeke appeared like a shadow behind his screen when Hilton came pounding and crying, Nana’s dead. Come help Nana. Zeke scooped Hilton under his arm and ran to the house.

When he got home, Hilton’s childhood flew from him. Nana was no longer lying lifeless on the kitchen floor. She was standing over the kitchen stove, stirring pots, and the first thing she said was: I wondered where you’d run off to, boy. She looked at Zeke’s face and nodded at him, then she fixed her eyes on Hilton. I’m ’fraid Nana’s made a mess of supper, Hilton. Just a mess.

You all right, Mrs. Kelly? Zeke asked, studying her face. Hilton did the same. She was perspiring, and her cheeks were redder than usual underneath her thin cocoa-colored skin.

Just fine. May have had a fainting spell is all. I hope Hilton didn’t send you into a fright.

Zeke mumbled something about how it wasn’t a bother, although he was annoyed. Hilton barely noticed Zeke slip back out of the house because his eyes were on Nana. His tiny hand still tingled from the memory of the cold flesh he’d touched, as unhuman as meat from the butcher. Nana’s smiles and gentle manner frightened him in a way he didn’t understand. He stood watching her, his tears still flowing.

Nana glanced at him several times over her shoulder while she tried to scrape burned stew from the bottom of her good iron saucepan. The scraping sounded grating and insistent to Hilton. For the first time in his life, Hilton wondered if Nana might ever do anything to try to hurt him.

Finally, Nana said, You go on out of the way now, Hilton. Supper’s late today. Don’t give me that face now, pumpkin. Nana’s not going to leave you.

Hilton wanted to take Nana’s fingers and squeeze them, to see if the cold was still there, but she hadn’t reached out to him and he wouldn’t dare touch her if she did. Hilton felt something had changed, maybe forever. He went outside to play with a three-wheeled wagon he’d found, but he wasn’t really playing. He was sitting on the front stoop, rocking the wagon back and forth in front of him, but he barely knew where he was or what he was doing. And, as he’d sensed, things were different after that day he found Nana on the kitchen floor. She began to wake up crying out from bad dreams. He watched her get out of bed for a glass of water in the moonlight, her nightgown so soaked with sweat he could see all the lines of her body as though she wore no clothes. Many nights Hilton went to sleep alone because Nana would stay up humming and writing hymns on the porch. She said she did this because she couldn’t sleep. Hilton knew the truth, that she didn’t want to. Maybe she had met the boogeyman.

It was fine with Hilton to be alone, because it was hard for him to sleep with Nana there. Her sleep breathing sounded different to him, the breaths longer and drawn farther and farther apart until he was sure the next one wasn’t coming, but it always did. Once, he counted a minute between her breaths. He tried to hold his own breath that long, but he couldn’t.

Nana was confused all the time now. She would get cross with him more easily than before, and she’d smack his backside for no good reason. One day Hilton was smacked when he didn’t bring home cubes of sugar he knew she had never asked him to bring.

This went on for nearly a year, and Hilton began to hate her. He was afraid of her for reasons he didn’t know or want to know. She’d never hurt him, not really, and on the rare occasions he touched her now her skin felt warm, but his memory of that day in the kitchen was too strong.

All of this changed the day Hilton took his first ride on a Greyhound, sitting at the back, of course, when Nana and their Belle Glade cousins took him to Miami for the Kelly-James family reunion. Twice before, Nana had stayed home and his women cousins drove him to the reunions to meet his kin, but she decided to go this year. The smells coming from Nana’s picnic basket and the wonder of the flat, endless Florida landscape through the bus window were enough to make Hilton forget his fear.

The reunion was at Virginia Key Beach, and Hilton had never seen anyplace like it. This was a beach in Miami for only colored people, and folks of all shapes and shades had flocked there that day. Hilton had become a good swimmer in canals near Nana’s house in Belle Glade, but he’d never seen so much sand and the trees and a green ocean stretching to forever. He’d always been told the ocean was blue, so the sparkling green ribbons of current were a wonder to him. Anything could happen on a day like today.

No one warned Hilton about the undertow, and he wouldn’t have understood if they had, but Nana did tell him he could only go in the water if he didn’t go far; this would have been enough if Hilton had minded like he should have. Nana, who was helping the ladies set up picnic tables, pointed to the orange buoy floating out in the water and said he could go only halfway there. And Hilton said Yes, Nana and ran splashing into the water knowing that he would go exactly where he wanted because in the water he would be free.

He swam easily past the midway point to the buoy, and he could see from here that it was cracked and the glowing paint was old. He wanted to get a closer look at it, maybe grab it and tread water and gaze back at all those brown bodies on the sand. And it was here that he met up with the undertow.

It was friendly at first. He felt as though the water had closed a grip around his tiny kicking legs and dunked him beneath the surface like a doughnut, then spat him back up a few feet from where he started. Hilton coughed and smiled, splashing with his arms. He didn’t know the water could do that by itself. It was like taking a ride.

The buoy was now farther than it was before the ocean played with him. It was off to his left now when it had been straight ahead. As Hilton waited to see if he could feel those swirling currents beneath him again, he heard splinters of Nana’s voice in the wind, calling from the beach: Hilton, you get back here, boy! You hear me? Get back here.

So the ocean was not free after all, Hilton realized. He’d better do as he was told, or he wouldn’t get any coconut cake or peach cobbler, if it wasn’t too late for that already. He began sure strokes back toward the shore.

The current still wanted to play, and this time it was angry Hilton was trying to leave so soon. He felt the cold grip seize his waist and hold his legs still. He was so startled he gasped a big breath of air, just in time to be plunged into the belly of the ocean, tumbled upside down and then up again, with water pounding all around his ears in a roar. Hilton tried to kick and stroke, but he didn’t know which way was up or down and all he could see was the water all around him specked with tiny ocean life. Even in his panic, Hilton knew not to open his mouth, but his lungs were starting to hurt and the tumbling was never-ending. Hilton believed he was being swept to the very bottom of the ocean, or out to sea as far as the ship he’d seen passing earlier. Frantically, he flailed his arms.

He didn’t hear Nana shout out from where she stood at the shore, but he’d hear the story told many times later. There was no lifeguard that day, but there were plenty of Kelly and James men who followed Nana, who stripped herself of her dress and ran into the water. The woman hadn’t been swimming in years, but her limbs didn’t fail her this one time she needed to glide across the water. The men followed the old woman into the sea.

Hilton felt he couldn’t hold his breath anymore, and the water mocked him all around. It filled his ears, his nose, and finally his mouth, and his muscles began to fail him. It was then, just as he believed his entire fifty-pound body would fill with water, that he felt an arm around his waist. He fought the arm at first, thinking it was another current, but the grip was firm and pulled him up, up, up, until he could see light and Nana’s weary, determined face. That was all he saw, because he went limp then.

He would hear the rest from others who told him in gentle ways about Chariots to the Everlasting and that sort of thing. One of the James men had been swimming closely behind Nana, and she passed Hilton to his arms. Then she simply stopped swimming, they said. Said maybe she just gave out. Nana’s head began to sink below the water, and just as one of the Kelly men reached to try to take her arm, the current she’d pulled Hilton from took her instead. The man carrying Hilton could only swim against it with all his might toward the shore. Many people almost drowned that day.

When Hilton’s senses came back to him and he was lying on the beach, caked in gritty sand, all that was left of Nana was her good flowered dress, damp and crumpled at the water’s edge.

So what the gifted old folks, the seers, often say is true:

Sometimes the dead go unburied.

Part One

Exiles

Funerals are important.

Away from home we cannot lay

our dead to rest

for we alone have given them

no fitting burial.

Self-conscious of our absence

brooding over distances in western lands

we must rehearse

the planned performances of our rites

till we return.

And meanwhile through the years

our unburied dead eat with us

follow behind through bedroom doors.

—Abena P. A. Busia, Ghana

One

Hilton looked at his watch and winced. Four o’clock. His wife’s reception had started at three, and although the lodge was only a ten-minute drive from here, he was late even by Colored People Time standards.

You got to go, right? Danitra asked, her arms folded across her chest, not hiding the disappointment on her painted lips. Hilton was intrigued by lipstick, especially this shade as bright as blood, because Dede never wore it.

But then, Dede didn’t have to.

I’ll be in trouble if I don’t, Hilton said, glancing at the boxes stacked in the empty apartment. Anything to keep his eyes off of her black tank top, which she wore with a brazenness only a woman in her early twenties could. You’re all set here, Miss Thang. I know the elevator’s broken, and it’s not Buckingham Palace, but—

Oh, please, Danitra laughed. "Close enough.

Reviews for The Between

[viragoreads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow! This was confusing, frustrating, and frightening all in the best way. This was flawlessly written. I was completely enveloped in this world. Eight-year-old Hilton James suffered from terrible nightmares after a near-death experience that claimed the life of his beloved Nana. These dreams followed him into adulthood, disappearing briefly after therapy sessions, only to return when he had another near-death incident. The dreams were worse and began consuming his waking life.His family (and Hilton) watched as he began to fall deeper into insanity from the lack of sleep and the visceral dreams. Then he began to wonder if he was actually crazy. Was he losing his mind? Or, were his dreams real?This was a beautifully crafted story story. And while the book didn't scare the pants off me like I had hoped, it did; however, mess with my head. I am now leery of dreaming. Well done, Ms. Due, well done.

[lizamichelle1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hilton is living on stolen time. At nine, he lost his Nana to the ocean when she went out to save him, but he knows he lost her way before then. Now, 30 years later, he is a husband and father of 2. He is having dreams; bad, sleep-depriving dreams. So bad he is not sure if the dreams are reality or his reality are his dreams.When a man threatens to kill his wife and children, he really loses it. He starts seeing things that aren't there. Appears to have ESP. Once he chooses to accept who/what he is, he finally gets peace.This book was a slow start for me, but I eventually got into the confusion of his mind/life and enjoyed the journey to his contentment.

[tea58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

All through the novel THE BETWEEN by TANANARIVE DUE I felt sympathy for Hilton and his family. Hilton is a husband and father of two children, Kaya and Jamil. Hilton suffers insomnia because of unexplained dreams and/or nightmares. Often these horrible dreams will have many doorways down a long hall, sometimes there is a drowning and sometimes his grandmother, Nana, appears in the dreams. When Hilton awakens from the dreams, he is not himself. He is sad, aloof and at times angry and definitely to exhausted to think clearly at work. Thankfully, he goes to see a therapist, Raul. Later, he will go to see Raul's brother for more help. The dreams are so painful he decides to let Raul hypnotize him.I've never thought much about the why of dreams. I know there are people who write their dreams down in journals. Other people believe wholeheartedly that their dreams are meaningful if they can unmix the symbolism. I did empathize with Hilton. I remember before my marriage and while still a child being frightened to death by nightmares. My parents settled for a night light in my bedroom and a lamp in the hallway. Still, I would run to my parents bed and jump in with them. I had no siblings at home who could have comforted me. Finally, my mother helped me to memorize The Twenty-Third Psalm. She said the Psalm would chase the nightmares away. Hilton end up getting a big dog, Charlie. It seems each person has their personal way of escaping the horror at night.I agreed totally with Hilton's bravery to seek counseling. However, he makes a dandy of a mistake which I could not condone. It just made me angry with him. I felt he played upon his psychological pain as a reason to do what he wanted to do just for a thrilling moment. In other words, I felt he used his depression about his dreams to excuse a bad action.The novel, THE BETWEEN, by TANANARRIVE DUE move from real time to Hilton's dream world. It's not a complicated move because the dreams are written in italics while Hilton's immediate and real environment is written in normal type. I liked the swing back and forth from the unreal to the real. I came to realize no matter what we believe about dreams they are an important part of our lives. I am left with questions about dreams. For example, why are we given dreams? Why do some people have more dreams than other people? Why is there so much symbolism in dreams? Isn't it asking a bit much for the average layman to unravel the meaning of these nightmares? In the end TANANARIVE DUE explains the why of Hilton's dreams. Wow! I never would have expected the reason for his sleepless nights. tananarivedue

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A true-page turner I devoured in a few hours that inhabits the gray spaces between dark fantasy and psychological thriller. Hilton James has felt since childhood that he needs to make his life count, because his grandmother lost her life saving him from drowning. Now his family is in danger; they've been getting death threats from a dangerous racist touched off by his wife's election making her the only black female judge in Miami--and Hilton seems to be losing it, caught up in disturbing nightmares. The style is clean, the story well-paced, and I liked the portrait of Miami and the way it handles difficult topics (homelessness, racism, drug addiction, AIDS, marital problems) with...ease is the best word. I wouldn't call it a light touch exactly, there's little humor here, but it's hard not to root for Hilton and his family, which both helps alleviate some of the darkness but also ups the suspense since you care what happens to them.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Haunting and powerful--this book might be labeled as horror, but I hesitate to call it that. Yes, it contains a supernatural element, but nothing like a ghost or haunted house. I suppose it comes down to whether you'd consider the television show Medium a horror show, or just suspense. As is, I'd call this strong suspense that is both haunting and striking. At moments, yes, it may even seem like horror, but in the end, I think it's simply a novel about fears and about family, in love and in struggle. I'm still trying to put my feelings on this one completely together, as you may already be able to tell. For now, I do recommend it if you're interested in horror, or if you're a fan of Toni Morrison's Beloved or Song of Solomon certainly. I still feel it's more of a suspense than a horror, but I do need to think on it some more.

[the_hag · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my second experience with Due...I started with The Good House (which I quite enjoyed)! In The Between: A Novel Due sets out to explore what could happen if you chanted your fate...if you cheated death as did the lead character, Hilton James did as a boy. James is haunted by memories of his near fatal accident as a child...and by visions of his grandmother which are both confusing and frightening and which seem to hint at alternate timelines. Hilton grows up with nightmares of his grandmother and becomes a successful social worker, saving lives of his charges along the way...with a wife and two lively children of his own. He even manages to rid himself of the nightmares for years by seeking help from Raul, his psychiatrist and later close friend. Then..."it" happens...that little thing that starts the collapse of his tidy, happy little world...he's in another accident and from there it's a downhill slide as he attempts to salvage his fragile mind while trying to figure out the mystery of the racist stalker. Due weaves an interesting tale where, through "dreams" we see Hilton change the events of his life in subtle but telling ways and where he has memories of things that never happened and doesn't remember things that did and where Hilton slowly unravels from the loving, caring, deeply devoted man to one who is on the verge of mental and physical exhaustion...slowly going crazy and driving away everyone who ever cared about him. The Between builds up to the point where you wonder if what he is experiencing is real or if he's just going nuts...it gives you a great deal to think about with the parallel worlds, doorways and travelers that is at times confusing, but also interesting and creepy. In the end we are left, along with Hilton to decide if he can continue to cheat death of if he's run out of doorways...The Between is an interesting novel and the premise ultimately seems to be that we all choose our own reality...in this moment with this choice (doorway), but that not all of us are aware, not all of us are travelers in the sense that on some level he KNOWS he's cheated death and actively works to cling to the life he no longer has a right to. Overall it's well written, interesting, psychologically creepy, and well worth reading! I give it four stars instead of five simply because the secondary characters aren't very well developed, so I never really engaged or identified with them to the extent I felt I should have. I would definitely recommend this!