I love myself a good horror novel but this is a whole new type I’ve found! It’s not quite The Exorcist * Novel by William Peter Blatty or Legion * William Peter Blatty. It references it but it’s far, far, off.

“I think the point is to make us despair,” the older priest said. “To see ourselves as,” he wheezed, “animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”

I think if you asked me what the hell did I just read, I’d tell you I read a story about a man experiencing a mental breakdown after his wife passed in a freak accident. His grief is so strong that he uses every excuse in the book to make it so it’s apparent it’s his fault. I know people blame themselves after someone’s passing – the what-if’s, the constant questions, maybe if something happened somehow different, the other person would still be alive.

What made it special for me was the protagonist. I don’t think I’ve read another horror written by a Mexican-American, where the protagonist was also a Mexican-American dude, far away from his roots as any child of an immigrant can be. He doesn’t speak any Spanish (or enough to help him), doesn’t know about the traditions and the bruhas or anything about folklore. Can you believe in a supernatural being if you never knew they existed? There’s a difference between the old world, first gen and second gen immigrants.

Diane, his mother-in-law, explains it quite well:

I’m from Mexico, Thiago,” she said, drinking the small liquor bottle. Her parents brought her over the border when she was six. “I’m sure you’ve got family from over there who’ve told you stories. Everyone’s grandpa has met the Llorona, everyone knows someone who can heal with their hands, everyone’s got a tía who can see spirits and talk to the dead. I’m sure little Thiago laid awake at night because he thought he heard the Cucuy in his room.”

Back to the main story – death and grief. I thoroughly recommend this book if you’ve lost a loved one.

I get now why old cultures and native tribes kept rituals for death. You exorcised the grief with a ritual and it gave everyone something to do, a space to be sad, and after the bereaved lifted that boulder or pierced their scrotum or sipped that hallucinogenic tea, we could all agree that the dead had been sufficiently mourned. They were adequately remembered, and none of us would feel guilty for what felt like a lack of action on our part.
If you’ve ever had to sit through a funeral that wasn’t at all what the deceased would have wanted, this book nails it.

If you’ve ever had to socialise with people that never knew the deceased and all they could give you would be banalities and dreams, this book is for you. If you’ve ever written a letter to a dead person, telling them how it feels to be left alive, this book is definitely for you.

Diane texted me, asking if I was heading to the cemetery on Sunday. This was going to be a thing now, either going to the cemetery with your parents or going on my own and confirming with her that I did. At least if I went on my own I could bring a book or listen to music, sit on the grass at least. Better than standing with your mom before the rectangle of grass that’s just a shade darker than the other grass around it, staring down at your grave, both of us silent and somber, the whole time I’m waiting for your mom to give the signal that we can leave, we’ve sufficiently paid our respects and now you can’t hate us or God can’t hold it against us, at least for one more week.
Your grave turned into a bookmark we couldn’t get past. That we kept going back to. You.

But alas, the book is not only about death, it’s also about a haunting. And a tale of what could be waiting for us beyond the great veil, or should I say, behind the great wall.

After you died I saw you in every woman’s face. I mistook them for you if I turned too fast or scanned a room. It wasn’t that they resembled you. They were you. You in a disguise, in a costume, but acting out some other role. They didn’t have to resemble you to trigger this. Elderly women, different nationalities, high school girls, a couple of times women in burkas. I could feel my pupils expand like a drop of blood in water. Your face would fade back into theirs within seconds, and I’d be left immobile and struggling to compose myself.

Well, I have been here. I know this feeling. This is probably why this book, in no way like any other horror book, it spoke to me.

When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So there were two deaths.

It’s the missing part that’s the most difficult. When our guy moves away and wants to start fresh in the middle of freaking nowhere, he still feels his mate.

An owl flew over the cabin and swept into the tree line. I stepped aside for you to see and then remembered you were dead.

There are some things you can’t escape and death leaves quite a mark and it’s so slow to heal. Thiago, our dude, gets a puppy, then the puppy dies too, then the puppy comes back to life but it’s not the same dog, so he takes him to the vet. The vet can’t attest whether it’s the same dog but thinks it’s not since he’d seen the dead one a day before. Then the Dog turns all Pet Sematary and attacks Tiago when he refuses to bury a piece of his wife in a hole in the ground as a significant way to put her to rest again. Or bring another entity into this world (like Constantine).

Then Tiago barely escapes the mad, rabid dog, just like Cujo, and his mother-in-law comes to help him.

The messages split me in half, Vera, and the halves had their own thoughts about what was going on. I was dreaming, I was going insane, I was communicating with you, I was being tricked. The part of me still struggling with what was happening picked himself off the floor and watched the other me still on his knees, rifling through clothes.

He’s going mad with grief or he’s being haunted by a supernatural entity?

The earth is not a good place. It’s slippery. You live on the edge of a blade. On one side is an abyss. On the other side is an abyss. Whatever happens on the blade, the horrors, I can’t control.”

He dreams of the Devil asking him to join a banquet of the dead. Like Valhalla. Is it a Demon or just his imagination, asking him to commit that dreadful act which would re-unite him with his beloved.

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.

So true, so true.

Last was the attack on the demon, or the entity.

The salt recommendation came from two different sources with two different reasons. One said the mineral was a byproduct of the ocean and therefore a symbol of the source of all matter and life, reminding the spirit to return to the underlying ocean of eternity. The second said a visiting spirit is compelled to count any spills you purposely make, taking it as a challenge, except since they lack a body they can’t move the grains they’ve counted and will inevitably lose count enough times that the frustration will force them to leave. Which I guess meant even in death there was still forgetfulness, OCD, frustration. Passing away didn’t alleviate us from the things that made life so tedious to begin with, we were beholden to that shit even in the afterlife. But whatever. I poured the salt.

It doesn’t work but it made me laugh a little as I’ve seen the salt trope all the way from the days of Supernatural on TV.

All in all, a fantastic read and I can’t wait to get more!