*3.5*

I'm struggling to rate this book. While there was nothing 'wrong' with the book and I thoroughly enjoyed the content and the characters, it was SO LONG!!! Like I understand the length, we got the FULL picture but I honestly believe that the book could've achieved the same impact with 300 less pages. Loved the hand on the cover and loved the hand imagery in the book. The relationship between boy and his father was tough to read but ended up being so much different than what we got in the beginning. Also enjoyed the cult themes in the book; certainly a dark cult and happy people from the inside wanted to take it down. The rift between worlds was interesting though I don't honestly fully understand the need to go there. Impressed with the translation and I will def continue to read Mariana!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House, Hogarth for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a lot of book that you just have to take your time to unravel the story. It is dark, but the way the characters interact with the dark parts is casual and that made it such a good read. Each character has such a unique pov and voice and how they interact with this family with dark desires and means.

This book is very long and took a tangent to other characters' back stories when I just wanted to know more about the occult and arcane things that were going on.

I don't think I was the appropriate audience for this epic. It was recommended to me due to my enjoyment of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, but it wasn't a good fit. I don't love horror, and I won't actively seek it out, but the description of Enriquez' story gave indication of more than that. I don't deny there was more, nor do I deny her ability to grip you, but this felt more convoluted than it needed to be, and it certainly could have used a judicious amount of red pen. The first half at least was more of a slogging through than anything, and I admit to having to force myself to make the effort. It also involved some pretty gory descriptions that made me walk away more than once, not wanting to come back anytime soon. I wish I could've liked this more, becaause I think Enriquez has talent, but I don't think I'm likely to seek her out in the future.

My thanks to Random House/Hogarth, the author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Random House/Hogarth on February 7, 2023

Our Share of Night is a literary horror novel, a domestic drama with a supernatural twist. A father hopes that his son did not inherit his connection to the Darkness. When it becomes apparent that his son shares his ability to summon the Darkness, he wants to shield his son from his wife’s family, who expect the Darkness to reveal the secret of immortality. The son loves and hates his father. He will eventually need to confront his family, just as his father did.

The Order regards Juan Peterson as a medium, an essential bridge to the Darkness and its secrets. The Order has deep roots in England, but a branch of the family moved to Argentina, where it is ruled by the matriarch Mercedes. Juan and Rosario, the daughter of Mercedes, had a son named Gaspar. Rosario died three months before the novel begins, but Juan should still be able to speak with her. He cannot find her because she has been hidden from him. Who did the hiding?

Juan was born with a defective heart. He’s had multiple surgeries, but he knows his condition will lead to a premature death. Before he dies, Juan is desperate to find a way to keep the Order from taking control of Gaspar. The Order wants to compel Juan to allow his essence to enter Gaspar at the moment of death. The transmigration of consciousness is the secret of immortality that the Order craves. Juan wants his son to live his own life, not as a continuation of Juan and not a life of servitude to the Order.

Juan is convinced that Rosario was murdered because she wanted to protect Gaspar from the clutches of her family. When the story opens, Gaspar is only six. The Order does not know whether Gaspar has inherited the ability to become a medium. Juan learns the distressing truth when Gaspar begins to see dead people. Juan keeps that knowledge a secret from family members as he teaches Gaspar to make the dead go away.

The story spans generations as it traces the history of the Order. Mercedes is the “priestess of a god who ignores her.” She is always looking for new mediums but Juan is the best she has found. Mariana Enríquez details the rituals the Order follows to satisfy the hunger of the Darkness. Initiates willingly, even ecstatically, lose limbs when they touch the Darkness after it is summoned by a medium. It’s rare for horror novels to make the supernatural seem real rather than silly, but Enríquez has created a shadow world that seems just as real and even more frightening than the world we inhabit.

The novel’s first half focuses on Juan and his relationships with other family members who belong to the Order, including Rosario’s half-sister, with whom Juan has a complicated and intimate history. Much about Juan is complicated, from his bisexual relationships with family members to his parenting of Gaspar. Is Juan an abusive father or is he doing what must be done to protect his son?

Gaspar comes into his own when he enters an abandoned house with his friends. One of those friends is Adela, a distant relative who lost her arm to the Darkness. The door to the house is locked but Gaspar has the ability to enter locked doors. They discover that the house is larger on the inside than its outside dimensions. Adela enters a room in the house and closes the door behind her, challenging Gaspar with the only door he cannot open. Adela is never seen again (at least not in the corporeal world). Her disappearance will trouble Gaspar in the years to come. Gaspar will also be troubled by memories, or the absence of memories that would explain gaps in his life. Those memories will eventually return and illuminate Gaspar’s history with his father, but only after his father’s death.

Like many good horror novels, the story contrasts supernatural terror with the horror that is part of life in the seen world. Chapters in the second half follow several characters, often embodying a different aspect of life in Argentina at different times in the nation’s turbulent history. Pablo is one of Gaspar’s friends who entered the house with Adela. Pablo is secretly in love with Gaspar, but Gaspar is straight. As he grows older, Pablo struggles to balance his fear of AIDS — a disease that eventually claims most of his friends — with the thrill of anonymous sex. Pablo is shunned by moralistic Argentina. He still feels the hand that grasped his shoulder when he was lost in the house where Adela disappeared. Perhaps the supernatural forces that haunt him are symbolic of the other fears that torment gay men in Argentina.

Vicky was also in the house with Gaspar and Pablo. Ten years later, she’s a talented medical student, with an almost supernatural ability to diagnose hidden diseases. She wants Gaspar to believe that his occasional encounters with (the ghost of?) Adela are hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. The reader, like Gaspar, will doubt that medicine can explain the experiences that Gaspar, Pablo, and Vicky have. The novel asks whether disease and mental illness might be an outsider's explanation of perceptions they do not share or understand.

A late chapter follows a journalist who tries to investigate the story of Adela. She learns how difficult it is to find Gaspar, even when she knows exactly where he lives. Another chapter follows Gaspar as he is haunted by the ghosts of his father and Adela. Psychiatric care does no good in a country where disappearances are common and everyone feels haunted. Argentina’s military dictatorship is a version of the Darkness; its believers control the nation in the way that the Order controls Gaspar’s family.

The novel covers an impressive amount of ground without ever causing confusion. Enríquez’s crystalline prose build a supernatural world that no less sharply focused than the Argentina in which her carefully crafted characters live. Themes of family drama (a well-meaning father whose parenting is cruel because he knows no other way; a mother who shields her child from the child's controlling grandmother) will resonate with families that are troubled by violence and strife that has no supernatural origin. A strong ending resolves Gaspar’s immediate problem while recognizing that the pain of lost souls and the risk of new horrors are always a part of life. Our Share of Night sets a new bar for literary horror novels.

RECOMMENDED

I really wanted to love this more!!! I have the mind to want to read the Spanish version because some of the text felt like maybe it wasn’t quite translated correctly. The story is beautiful and historic but was long in some points.

I tend to take a break from only reading horror to read various works of literary fiction or of other genres. Rarely does the literary overlap so heavily with genre. Authors like Stephen Graham Jones have succeeded in writing in the horror genre and then moving towards literary. But I never see it the other way around.

Our Share of Night is a literary marvel that delves further into the dark depths of horror than many of the most brutal genre titles, all while balancing a family narrative that spans multiple points of view and several decades. Mariana Enríquez took a near 600 page novel and plotted it out with exquisite care, creating a perfectly paced and exceptionally creepy environment in which to hold her dark ceremonies.

The world of Our Share of Night feels lived in, its characters manage to be developed and fleshed out far more than a typical horror novel would be able to manage, and, despite how bleak and oppressive its tone is, Enríquez is able to inject a startling amount of warmth and heart (😏) into an otherwise cold world.

Juan is a loving father who wants to protect his son. Gaspar is a lonely boy who is finding himself in the world, curious, tenacious, and both powerful but powerless to change his future. Rosario is a loving mother and partner who fears what the darkness holds for the future of those she loves. Mercedes is a horrifying and reprehensible power of pure evil. There are many more side characters and important pawns in the power struggle of The Order and what the darkness demands, but these four are the pillars on which Our Share of Night is built.

Our Share of Night deftly handles 1980s South American politics, the AIDS crisis, family drama, occultism, grief, horror, and love — all of which get enough time on the page to feel effective and worthwhile.

This book isn’t for everyone. It’s long, it’s dense, it’s scary, and above all else it’s unrelenting. Our Share of Night will grip you tightly within the grasp of its beautiful golden claws — and mark you as one of its own.

5/5 🌟

Special thanks to Random House Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I've been waiting to read this book and it did not disappoint. I love this book
. One of my favorites of 2023!

A definite masterpiece!

This horror masterpiece subtly picks apart colonialism, military regimes and social constructs. It brings to light how family can be imprisoning and hold you back. At the same time, it demonstrates acceptance of so many culturally taboo things. It shows how certain fixations can go beyond obsessive and instead be repulsive. Juan is taken in as a child after Rosario's uncle saves his life. At this time, he is also recognized as a medium for their Order, a cult-like group that sounds of dark magic, witchcraft and other dark practices. They stop at nothing to get their desire, immortality. It is dark and gruesome, resulting in many "sacrifices" and deaths. Juan falls in love with Rosario, and they have a child, Gaspar, who they request that the Order stay away from even though they have already claimed him as a vessel for the medium when Juan dies. When Rosario dies, they return to her family and the Order for some time. During this time, Juan finds a way to protect Gaspar and enlists his brother- and sister-in-law to help. It is a tale of resistance and fighting the darkness. Overall, it was intriguing, but I did feel that some things might have been lost in translation.

Absolutely insane and completely brutal. Absolutely gorgeous writing, it sucks you in and keeps you there. I wish it had been maybe a tad more atmospheric, but a dark masterpiece.

Captivating, enthralling, emotional, and so deeply complex. While Enriquez’s book comes in at over 500 pages, it reads like a breeze. Full of family tragedy and occult history, this book is the definition of a hauntingly wild ride that satiated my need for a deeply personal supernatural story. Trust me when I say, you will not want to miss out on this one. It’s incredibly unique, but also familiar. It’s full of the textures of life in all of its forms. Truly a pleasure to read!

Even though the characters draw the reader in, it is the length of the book that pulls this reader out of the story. After reading for days and days, it was a shock to discover that I was only 40% into the almost 800 page book. It is then that I notice that there are superfluous details that simply don't move the plot closer to the climax. Satellite stories take up chapters of details that don't get me to Gaspar's outcome. And at 40%, even though I really want to know if all of Juan's horrible parenting gets Gaspar to safety, I can't stay with this book. I loved the first 30%, but the last 10% took it out of me. Maybe I'll just read the last 10% to find out what happens.

Our Share of the Night isn’t like anything I have read before. It’s a complex story with overlays of magic, supernatural and occult practices set in the backdrop of the unrest in Argentina and the atrocities of the regime. There are a number of emotions as well as strange practices that don’t all make sense. I am glad that as the story is unfolding, by the end of part one, we have a good context for the main characters – Juan and his son, Gasper. The intensity of Juan’s powers and the possible inheritance of the same for Gasper and their implications are starting to reveal themselves amidst a political plot in the Order. I was intrigued to read more and had no idea what is going to happen next.

The pace of the book is erratic and with all the different perspectives that we get, sometimes it was very hard to get into a new part of the book. If this book had been in chronological order, I won’t have minded the different POVs so much.

The first part sets a good stage for Juan and Gasper’s characters and for all the parts that follow them, I enjoyed the story. I cared about their relationship, the person Gasper was becoming, the consequences of Juan hiding things from Gasper, Gasper’s friendships… Everything was interesting and engaging. The rest of the parts showed the true horror of the cult and the magic Juan was capable of exercising. They also did a helped make the story cohesive at the end.

Juan was an interesting choice of medium, considering he had a weak heart. Yet, his control and precision with using Darkness is something I only appreciate now in hindsight. I wanted more exploration of his powers, especially the telepathy. If he had taught Gasper, I can’t even imagine how powerful Gasper would have become. Our Share of Night portrays the changing parent-child relationships through Gasper as well as his friends’ families. I loved the band of friends: Adela and Vicky and Pablo and how they were almost haunted by different things in life.

First, a thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me read an eArc of this book.

I wanted to like this. By god, so badly I wanted to like this. I heard nothing but good things about this author, and the cover is amazing. Supernatural horror? Cults? Non-American? Sign me up!

But honestly, I felt zero connection, sick interest or otherwise, in any of these characters. This setting of a weird secret society and The Darkness could have been really interesting, but it just... didn't do it for me.

DNF at 21% of the way through. I just have too many books on my TBR and too many ARCs to keep trying to make this one work for me.

Our Share of Night is a tome of a book, dealing with complex histories of Argentina that are horrific in their own rite, but Enriquez's use of the occult takes that horror to new heights. This makes Our Share of Night both difficult to read at points but also unforgettable and incredibly affecting. The story of a father's violent love of his son and the lengths he will go to protect him, set against a tumultuous and dangerous backdrop, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

links to review tk.

I'm just starting to read horror and I'm glad I started with this one. This was a book with a really in-depth magical system. It was a very involved system in which the witches are subjected to a lot of pain and anguish that I did become a little disturbed.

I thought the writing was fantastic. I thought the characters were all so well written, and fully formed. This author did such a wonderful job at truly painting a picture. I really enjoyed our protagonist’s determination to stop at nothing to protect his son from the family practices in which he is trying to escape from.
#netgalley #ourshareofnight

Set against the backdrop of the Argentinian regime, Our Share Of The Night, joins the ranks of Latin-American novels that explore the many layers of reality and terrifying monsters. Mythology, inter-generational horrors, socio-economic exploitation and a variety of voices make this book a must read if horror is your genre.

For most my of my adult life, I thought that horror just wasn’t for me. I associated the genre with older, male authors like H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, whose work I never found especially compelling or relatable. The kind of characters and fears that their fiction centered seemed very distant from my lived experience, and their massive popularity placed them on a cultural pedestal that I simply wasn’t interested in challenging. What’s the point, I thought, in reading things that were designed to scare you? Isn’t real life terrifying enough?

All this changed when I stumbled upon a short story collection titled Things We Lost in the Fire. I read it because it came highly recommended by people I trusted, and only realized it was horror halfway through the book. By that point, I was so captivated by Mariana Enríquez’s twisted imagination that I just wanted more. So I started dipping my toes in horror fiction written by women and queer people, only to discover that I did, in fact, love to read stuff that was designed to scare me. What makes horror good, I learned, is precisely its ability to sublimate societal and cultural anxieties into fictional scenarios; to create an imaginary bubble—a safe space, if you will—where nightmarish ideas can be explored and dissected with no real-life consequence.

And it’s this facet of the genre that Enríquez excels at. Her ability to explore the dark side of womanhood, family relations, and Latin American history has always been apparent in her writing, but her craft reaches new heights in Our Share of Night. This monumental novel grapples with four decades of Argentinian history, dissecting how collective traumas caused by dictatorship, colonialism, and poverty impact individual characters and their relationships with one another.

Through the eyes of a violent, traumatized father and his young son, we come face to face with the machinations of a corrupt cult whose ultra-rich members will stop at nothing to become even more powerful. Greed, the author seems to say, is an insatiable, self-cannibalizing monster that exploits the marginalized before eventually destroying the privileged, too. I know cannibalism has basically become a trend in contemporary fiction, but Enríquez uses this trope with skill and purpose to make a point about how the ruling classes have historically used occultism to try and further their agendas. Speaking of which: I don’t know who wrote the copy for the American edition, but this is very much not a vampire novel. How anyone could read the book and come to this conclusion is a mystery to me.

At the end of the day, all I can say about Our Share of Night is that it was my favorite book I read last year. It cast a spell on me that I haven’t been able to break ever since. Occasionally, I’ll find myself eyeing my copy on the bookshelf, tempted to pick it up and re-read a passage or two; but the anguish and distress it caused me are still so fresh in my mind that I can’t bring myself to do it. Turning the last page, I felt just like Gaspar, haunted by horrors too ancestral to be fully grasped by the human mind; only in my case, it was the monsters conjured by Mariana Enríquez’s imagination that I found impossible to shake off.

This book took a month of my life and f'd me up. Do not be daunted by its 650 pages; I was fully transported by page 5 and dying to know how this would end. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Our Share of Night is a novel from acclaimed Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, and is apparently (per the publisher statement that comes with the novel) her first novel to be translated into American English, even as her earlier novels were well acclaimed internationally. The novel is a 600 page historical fantasy horror novel, taking place largely in Argentina and Britain from the 1960s through the 1990s, and deals heavily with the Argentine politics of the time, as the nation struggles with a dictatorship, than a struggling democracy, and political and economic crises during and thereafter. Of course these historical events are often in the background (but well present) as the novel deals largely with a father and son who are involved with a Cult dedicated to a Supernatural Darkness that consumes, marks and sacrifices in exchange for cryptic messages about immortality - a cult led by a trio of rich loaded and politically connected families with little concern for who they destroy along the way.

The result is a fascinating novel which at times feels overwritten - with excessively long paragraphs and long passages without interruption - that somehow still is enthralling, as the story takes place in six parts that jump forward and backwards in time and perspective to reveal what is happening and what has already happened. So we get large parts taking place from the perspectives of the father Juan and mother Rosario in which they reveal their actions within the cult and their connections to the supernatural but also two large parts taking place from the perspective of their son Gaspar, who is ignorant of what dark magic his parents are/were a part of and why his father is acting strange and occasionally violent, and just trying to grow up and live his own life with his three friends. There's some strong themes here of class, of family, and some horrifying moments to go along with it, although I do think the novel falters a bit in the end when it all has to come together ridiculously quickly.

TRIGGER WARNING: Child Abuse, Rape off page, Torture off page, Mass Murder, and Mental Illness. One part deals heavily with trauma and how different people experience it, etc. Nothing done gratuitously, but serious topics are of issue in this book.
--------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------
1981 Argentina is a country gripped in a dictatorship that maintains a terrifying grip on power. In the midst of this, a sick man Juan, and his son Gaspar, makes a trip by car through the countryside, taking care not to run into Government forces. But Juan is no ordinary man, he is the medium for the supernatural monstrous power known as the Darkness, a power which is worshipped by the secret Order known as the Cult of the Shadow. Juan not only can summon the Darkness, which consumes and marks those too close all the while whispering mad secrets to others, but can see echoes of the dead and conjure demons to provide him with answers. But his beloved wife Rosario is dead and Juan cannot see her and Juan knows this must be the work of others in the Order, such as Rosario's monstrous mother Mercedes, who wish to use Gaspar as Juan's heir....or worse. To Juan's dismay, Gaspar does indeed show signs of having inherited his powers....but Juan is resolved to under no circumstances allow the Order to get their hands on Gaspar and he will do anything - no matter how monstrous or dangerous - to keep him safe.

Four years later, in 1985, Argentina is seemingly in a better place, with a newfound democracy emerging in place of the old terrorizing Dictatorship. In this new world Gaspar grows up in Buenos Aires in a house with his father, who acts strange and sometimes cruelly, along with his three friends Pablo, Vicky, and Adela, with whom he grows up and goes to school. But the Argentina in which they are growing up still holds many dangers, and for Gaspar and his friends, those dangers are not just fallout from political crackdowns, but Juan's erratic dangerous behavior and the strange things they occasionally sense around their neighborhood of the city. Strange things that seem to be coming from a mysterious abandoned house that no one seems brave enough to enter......
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I've described Our Share of Night's plot by describing the setup of two of the book's more significant parts, but the above plot summary is a bit misleading - the book is not so simple or linear in its presentation. The book is divided into six parts, although two are pretty short and are rather more like interludes than full parts, with each part taking place in a different time period and place, often involving characters mentioned in a prior part but not focused upon for various reasons (like, for example, being dead). The shift from one part to another might result in a jumping forward or back in time, and several of these parts are told in third person from multiple perspectives (while one part is told in first person by a single narrator), even if a part may have a more central character around whom things revolve. The book also - and some of this may be the formatting of my ARC but I don't think so - relies on long passages without paragraph breaks as events happen and things are experienced by their third person narrators, such that you might feel overwhelmed and exhausted reading it at times.

And yet largely, this style of writing works, as the story deals with its characters who grow and struggle with both fantasy elements and real political elements for reasons that the reader (and sometimes the characters) doesn't quite understand at first, but are slowly revealed as the book jumps back and forth in time...the book does a remarkable job bringing back moments from earlier to later such that it feels rewarding to see how things come together, even as the book never quite feels too much like a chore of a puzzle. This works even as the story's genre kind of changes from part to part - Part 1 focuses on Juan and is firmly in horror fantasy, as he deals with the cult that relies on his power and wants his son Gaspar, and revolves around Juan's knowledge of what's going on....but then our next major part, Part 3, is written largely from the perspectives of Gaspar and his three friends, all of whom are completely ignorant of the cult and its magic even as some of them have ties to it they're unaware of. That third part essentially serves as a coming of age story at times, as the quartet deals with their problems and ordinary lives - Gaspar with his confusing sometimes abusive father, Vicky with her fears, Adela with her struggles to be understood about her one arm, Pablo with his growing understanding that he's gay* in a world where that is more known but still highly discriminated against, etc. Of course the horrors behind the scenes do eventually play a part, but much of Gaspar's two major parts deal with ordinary life in a highly troubling and difficult time in Argentina, dealing with trauma, queerness, abuse, relations, and more, and these parts are written really well such that you hardly mind how long you have to wonder when the fantasy horror elements will come into play before they do. Similarly Juan's part works well, as does the spoiler protagonist of the book's fourth part whose first person perspective deals a lot with hubris and wealth amidst some absolute monsters of people (while itself being a bit of coming of age).

*Notably, the book is very queer at times - Juan is bi and has lovers of both sexes and no one of importance thinks anything about it, other characters involved with the cult are either trans or non-binary based upon descriptions, and the book deals heavily in its last act with the struggles of the gay community during AIDS in Argentina.

There's a lot of strong themes here, of both the struggles of living amidst dangerous and dark times of history and of things made clear through the fantasy elements as well, most notably themes of the monstrousness of the rich and aristocratic, such as the three families who form the backbone for the horrible cult that seeks immortality that centers large parts of the story - their connections to the dictatorship and other monsters and how they act towards family, towards those they and their allies colonize, and more are utterly evil and repulsive, which is exactly what the author is no doubt going for. And like I said above, it comes together really well, so that it's really enthralling. That said, the book kind of suffers from in my opinion a rather weak ending - the final part features the fantasy elements coming into play really late, after a long section without them, and that section is resolved insanely quickly, to the point where it feels like the payoff of the finale is not earned at all. But overall, this is a fascinating book and I'd really be interested to see what others think about it.