This was a fascinating take on the magical realism genre, and I absolutely loved it. I don't often get along with translated fiction, but the translation in this novel was really well done. It's unsettling, political, and yet deeply intimate with its family drama. I do feel it was a little long in places and the pacing could have been a bit more consistent, but it still didn't detract from my overwhelming enjoyment of this brilliant novel debut.

Spanning the brutal decades of Argentina's military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed inheritances, and the sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny. This book was such a pleasure to read, such a beautifully written, atmospheric book.

Although I have previously quoted Lady Gaga’s iconic "talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference, put it in a blender, shit on it, vomit on it, eat it, give birth to it." to describe my feelings for another book, I can’t help but use them again in this review as they really capture my sentiments & thoughts towards Our Share of Night.

“He also remembered his father’s words, nothing can hurt you now, how long was now, how long did the present last?”


This is an elaborate genre-bending work that defies easy categorisations. Even a summary or a rundown of the story would not do it justice. It is dark, grotesque, obscure, and frankly mind-boggling. Yet, the way Mariana Enríquez manages to combine together tropes, themes, and aesthetics associated with the fantasy, gothic, and horror genres is utterly mesmerizing. Much of the narrative is animated by a fraught father-son relationship, one that is complicated by monstrous inheritances and destinies, sickness, and a history of violence, abuse and destruction. Over the course of the novel, Enríquez weaves together an unsettling tapestry, one that I was unable to look away from. As Enríquez navigates haunted people and places, the price of power and privilege, and the dark side of faith, she incorporates motifs of the uncanny and the Other while also presenting us with striking, and frankly horrifying, images of the abject and the sublime. While there is much brutality and cruelty within the pages of Our Share of Night, those almost work towards making those rare moments of lightness and tenderness all the more precious. The writing has this cinematic quality to it, one that results in some visually arresting & often disturbing scenes. The characters populating the story defy easy categorisation, with the exception perhaps of the older members of the Order (who are all f*cking evil). Ambivalence permeates the story and its characters, whose motives and desires more often than not elude and alienate us, allowing plenty of room for interpretation.

“There is no greater disappointment than to believe oneself the chosen one and not to be chosen.”


The narrative begins in January 1981 with a road trip. Juan, recently widowed, is in his late 20s and making his way from Buenos Aires with his son to visit his in-laws' estate, in northeast Argentina. His choice to drive there seems rather injudicious given the country’s climate of terror, and that his in-laws had bought him airplane tickets. But Juan needs to spend time alone with his son, Gaspar, as he is desperately trying to protect him from his own faith. His in-laws are prominent members of the Order, a cult formed by nauseatingly wealthy people who have powerful connections all over the world. The Order, we learn, has exploited Juan not only for his ability to see and commune with the dead but because his body can host the Darkness. To summon it they are willing to commit atrocities that defy human comprehension, be it enslaving and torturing children or driving their own members insane in ways that are too repulsive to mention here. Juan knows that the Order has its sights on Gaspar, and is painfully aware that he won’t be alive long enough to watch over him so he hatches a desperate plan to keep his son safe, even if it requires him to commit his own cruelties and even if it will inevitably push his son away from him.

“I’m going to miss him, he thought, I’ll be glad when he’s gone because without him it’ll be easier to stop being sad, but I’m going to miss him…”


We are later reunited with Gaspar in 1985 where we read of his bond with three other children, and of his fraying relationship with his father Juan, whose mercurial behaviour he can never predict or comprehend. The dictatorship’s aftermath, 80s popular culture and memorable events, make for a vivid backdrop against which Gaspar and his friends grow up. A sense of growing unease obfuscates much of his childhood, as his father begins to act in an increasingly incomprehensible and ‘deranged’ way. But Juan refuses to let Gaspar in, and in doing so their relationship begins to fray. Resentment and confusion lead Gaspar to find solace in his group of friends…but after one of their daring exploits takes a devastating turn, nothing is ever the same for them.

“It had the look of a spot where something bad had happened: an expectant air. Evil places wait for evil things to reoccur, or else they seek it out.”


We then learn more about Gaspar’s mother, a woman who was complicit in the horrors and agenda of the Order, but someone who nonetheless was trying to steer the power away from the evilest people in the cult, her mother included. Her devotion to the Darkness and her inability to understand its true repercussion and ramifications (most of all on Juan) did not endear her to me. But her youth and upbringing do play a part in the way she understands this force and even if I could not bring myself to like her I appreciated that she wasn't made into a saint-like figure (the typical dead mother of the 'chosen one').

“There is no arguing with faith, though. And it’s impossible to disbelieve when the Darkness comes. So, we trust, and we go on. At least, that’s what many of us do.”


The novel concludes with a traumatized Gaspar trying to live with and make sense of his father’s dark inheritance. Here Enríquez interrogates the realities of living with the kind of baggage Gaspar is carrying around, and of the way, his exposure to some Dark Shit™ has irrevocably changed him.

As I said, this story is Dark. The type of dark that requires every trigger warning under the sun. While there are certain scenes and some elements within the story they do toe the line with being gratuitous and sensationalistic, what ultimately comes through is the empathy Enríquez demonstrates towards her core characters. There is a lot of politically incorrect language (particularly when talking about disabilities, amputees, poc & lgbtq+ ppl) but given the story’s setting, it seemed ‘realistic’ enough. Sure I did question the choice to have the only really explicit sex scenes be between men, and how we had to have a scene of a young teen questioning his sexuality just happen to ‘spy’ on two men having sex or his having to be enamoured with his straight best friend (i am kind of done with this trope tbh) but these are minor criticisms. I did mostly like the way Enríquez challenges the gay/straight dichotomy and the story’s esoteric take on the ‘androgyne’. Additionally I also liked that she incorporated the Guaraní language (as well as some beliefs) in her story.

My heart went out to Gaspar, even when he acted in a way that made me (or his loved ones) despair. True, the boy could be a bit basic (on his first crush: Belén “wanted too study engineering: she was different from other girls”; and: “the woman, though older, was beautiful; she wore no make-up—Gaspar didn’t like how make-up looked, especially lipstick”) but Enríquez really manages to make us feel and understand his struggle. From a child living in a solitary house with his inscrutable & volatile father, whose capacity and propensity to hurt him often leaves him feeling confused and afraid, to a teenager and young adult wracked by guilt and haunted by a force he cannot begin to comprehend, Gaspar is subjected to so much sorrow, sadness, and abuse throughout this story that it is impossible not to feel for him, especially when we witness how the years have eaten away at him. Enríquez also allows us to understand, never quite condone, Juan and his ways, and it was heartbreaking to see how much his experiences with the Order change him.

“Even wih all the hatred, contempt, ambivalence, and repulsion he felt towards the Order, that power was still his, and he didn’t posses many things. Renunciations is easy when you have a lot, he thought. He had never had anything.”


While the Order’s ideology and the way it operates are ultimately as horrifying as they are mystifying, we witness (first-hand or not) the terrifying lengths that they will go to achieve their goal. Their willingness and eagerness to exploit vulnerable people is reprehensible, and yet their wealth and ancestry (most are of white european heritage) endow them with the belief that they are more deserving than others, that their lives are more valuable.

In addition to crafting a brutal yet gripping tale about the lengths a father will go to to protect his son, Enríquez gives Gaspar’s own coming-of-age storyline a horror spin, making Our Share of Night into a difficult to pigeonhole novel. There were also so many details related to the time period the story unfolds in that made the setting seem hyper-real (making those places of horror all the more unsettling). Yet, while Enríquez’s nuanced portrayal of 80s Argentina grounds the characters in reality, their experiences with otherworldly forces ultimately transport them (and us) into more fantastical and macabre places.

While Our Share of Night is a distinctly unique book, I was reminded of several authors & books, the most obvious being Stephen King (a hotel room? a child seeing dead ppl? a group of kids who are dealing with some-thing-place that is truly evil?), Neil Gaiman, Scott Hawkins, the Dyachenko's Vita Nostra, T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Helen Oyeyemi, Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters (which i didn’t get but i might revisit it having loved this), Alex Landragin’s Crossings and quite a lot of horror collection of short stories, written by authors such as Amparo Dávila, Octavia E. Butler, and Sayaka Murata. I was even reminded of Stranger Things & Baccano!. So if you happen to like any of the names I just mentioned you should definitely consider picking up Our Share of Night. I much preferred it to Enríquez’s short stories, so even if you like me, were not particularly taken by her storytelling there, I recommend you give this a chance.

I am definitely planning on re-reading this (perhaps opting for the italian translation instead or hey ho since i am moving to spain soon i might even one day be able to read the original).

In its opening pages, Our Share of Night throws the reader in at the deep end, right in mid-action, with little explanation as to what is happening. We know – from the title of the chapter – that we are in January 1981. We can gather that young Gaspar and his father Juan are leaving Buenos Aires, on the run from someone or something. We learn that Gaspar’s mum Rosario died in a horrendous traffic accident and that Juan has serious health problems. But the story is not told linearly, and readers must put in some effort to orientate themselves. And there’s ample time to do so, as this is a tome of a novel, running at over 700 pages. In this sort of novel, spoilers would be criminal and so I will only give a high-level indication of the plot. It turns out that Juan is a natural medium who not only “sees dead people” like the guy in The Sixth Sense but, more chillingly, is a conduit for a demonic entity referred to as “The Darkness”. His supernatural powers are harnessed by a group of rich and high-class families who are part of “The Order”, a society which seeks to communicate with the Darkness for its devious ends, not least achieving immortality. Although close to the Order, Juan does not trust its members and, realising that Gaspar has inherited his supernatural traits, wants to spare Gaspar the fate which seems reserved for him.

The novel has a largely symmetrical structure – the second and fifth (of six chapters) are much shorter than the others and are somewhat self-contained, although they are better understood in the context of the remaining chapters, which are much longer. Some chapters revisit earlier material, reproposing it in a different light or presenting it from the perspective of a different character. Most of the novel takes place in Argentina, although a good part of the fourth chapter, which centres on the story Gaspar’s mother Rosario, is set in 60s London, thus allowing a bizarre cameo appearance by David Bowie. The timeline is fluid, moving backwards and forwards and ultimately covering close to four decades from 1960 to 1997. Attention to historical detail gives each section its specific aura – whether its the 1986 World Cup (in the third chapter) or the Aids crisis and the protest movements of the 80s and 90s (particularly in the final segment).

Mariana Enríquez has, so far, been best known in the English-speaking(reading) world for her collections of short stories The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire. These were compared to the works of Borges and Shirley Jackson and wowed both the Gothic/horror crowd and readers of more mainstream “literary” fiction. I must admit that I hadn’t read either of those books before tackling her novel Our Share of Night but, based on the reviews of her shorter fiction I was expecting an experimental work which would give me a tough time. I was (pleasantly) surprised to discover that this novel is, in many ways, quite a traditional narrative-driven epic which held my attention despite its length (lately, I rarely manage books exceeding four hundred pages, let alone twice that).

There are certainly many dark delights in here for lovers of the Gothic to savour. Whatever Gothic trope you can think of will probably be lurking within these pages, possibly reworked, but still recognisable: there are ghosts, monsters, body horror, folk horror, South American beliefs and superstitions, occult rituals, a dose of Catholicism for good measure, decaying jungle mansions, secret passages, nightly ceremonies, secret societies redolent of the Geheimbundroman, tarot, spells, haunted houses (whose area, House-of-Leaves-like, is different on the inside than on the outside), family secrets. And true to the Gothic tradition of social consciousness, the story also doubles as not-so-subtle political commentary. The Order is close to Argentina’s junta, and the sadistic, ritual violence of sect – described, at times, in stomach-churning detail, ultimately reflects and feeds off the real-life thuggery of the higher political echelons. The Order also represents the evils of capitalism, with the expendable mediums representing the downtrodden, used and abused by the system.

This political dimension, coupled with the unusual non-linear narrative, gives Our Share of Night its contemporary vibe. However, apart from this, there’s some great “old-fashioned” storytelling here which only starts to fall apart in the final section. Here I thought that certain loose ends were tied up too quickly, while others were left open and unaddressed.

Like her short stories, Mariana Enríquez’s novel is rendered in a masterful English translation by Megan McDowell, with illustrations by Pablo Gerardo Camacho adding to the work’s macabre atmosphere.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2022/07/our-share-of-night-by-mariana-enriquez.html

I am about 250 pages in but I fear it is not my cup of tea. If it were shorter I would have made an effort to finish it, but life is too short. It's not that it's a bad book and I can see why many people absolutely love this. As I feared, there is too much of the occult and too much fantasy for me. I had hoped it would be a family saga first with the magical elements in the background (a bit like David Mitchell, Garcia Marquez or Murakami where I can live with them), but here they play a central role.

I unexpectedly loved Enriquez' short story collection "Things we lost in the fire" where the supernatural elements are more in the background and somehow more mysterious. Apparently, I am willing to go along with her wild ideas for 14 pages, but not 700.

Mariana Enriquez’s ambitious novel reads like a subversion of the magical-realist, family saga once so strongly associated with Latin American fiction, here transformed into epic, commercial horror. Enriquez’s work’s been labelled “a cocktail of politics and cult horror.” In interviews she’s attributed her fascination with combining the two to the particular evils of Argentina’s political past, “There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the state that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well.” An observation that essentially sums up the underlying plot of her award-winning book.

It’s an unsettling, macabre story that shifts around in time and between voices and styles – sometimes consciously literary, sometimes direct and unpolished, sometimes closer to pulp fiction. Just like her earlier work, Enriquez builds on elements taken from Argentinian mythologies from folklore to folk horror to gods and saints. All of which are contained within a narrative that displays the influence of her favourite writers from Stephen King to China Miéville. The central section, featuring characters first encountered in Enriquez’s short stories, echoes aspects of It; while others have a more fantastical feel.

At its heart are the machinations of a family whose immense wealth has given them equally-immense power within Argentinian society. This secretive clan are also founders of a global cult, The Order; seeking the key to immortality by accessing an amorphous force known as “the darkness.” To achieve their goal, successive generations have ruthlessly exploited the poor and vulnerable, both as fodder for, and conduits to, a supposedly-demonic realm. During the time of the Junta in the 70s and 80s, the family flourishes, their savagery unremarkable against a backdrop of brutal political oppression, mass murders, torture and disappearances.

The wider political environment is highlighted throughout, with storylines explicitly building on news items like the slow death of Omayra Sanchez Garzon that played out on television screens across the country; or the unearthing of the mass graves left behind after the fall of the military dictatorship. AIDs, protest movements, labour unrest, hyperinflation and the economic crises of the 80s and 90s, all play a role in Enriquez’s characters’ lives. Even The Order and its obsession with the supernatural brings to mind prominent figures in Argentina’s history like the sinister José López Rega, aka El Brujo, one-time advisor to Perón.

Enriquez’s attention to historical detail is both a strength and a weakness, at least for me. At various stages, Enriquez piles on the gore, carefully documenting The Order’s perverse rituals and routine cruelties - sometimes to near-absurd levels. Yet I found the brutality and horror of Argentina’s actual history ultimately far more potent and chilling than Enriquez’s portrayal of supernatural events. Although, I suppose it’s possible that’s one of the points she’s trying to make here. It’s not a subtle piece, some episodes are fluid and gripping, others a little clunky. The pacing’s also fairly uneven, and the later sections are a bit too narrowly descriptive, long-drawn-out, stilted and breathless at the same time. Although I’m more than happy I read this, from my perspective it would definitely benefit from further editing. I don’t think the length is entirely justified, there’s just too much mundane detail, and unnecessary repetition.

Translated by Megan McDowell. Part-title illustrations by Pablo Gerardo Camacho.

Juan is beautiful, troubled, mysteriously widowed, a source of dark power who is ruthlessly exploited by a cult. He is determined to save his son Gaspar from becoming heir to both his powers and his entrapment. But as father and son drive through the humid landscape along the Argentina/Brazil border, he can tell that Gaspar has already started experiencing their share of night, the ability to see ghosts and other dark currents.

I really enjoyed Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire. That collection used horror tropes and a macabre atmosphere to explore the many dark moments of Argentina’s recent past, particularly the military dictatorship of the 1970s but also the aftermath of financial ruin and the mix of contemporary urbanism and folk worship of dark saints in Buenos Aires. But it seemed to me to be a political document (though they were great stories in their own right).

So I was surprised by Enriquez’s first novel, which won Spain’s Herralde prize. On the surface it is more of the same, only supersized (almost 700 pages). There’s a story revolving around dark magic, along a timeline which jumps around from the 1960s to the late 1990s. Interspersed with the fantasy, there are many references to the dictatorship, the disappeared. There’s even a rewrite/plagiarism of one of Enriquez’s own stories (“Adela’s House”) in which children exploring a haunted house find shelves of fingernails, eyelids, and other signs of implied torture of political prisoners.

However, the novel struck me as very much <i>not</i> a political document, and that these mentions of historical atrocities were window dressing to the main story. Which in turn has made me question to some extent what Enriquez’s project actually is. I really liked the political project. And this is not it.

But that aside, this is a good fantasy novel, written with depth and a measure of creativity, with different sides of the story woven together jumping backwards and forwards in time. I like fantasy when it is well written with fully explored characters, and this is. I was pretty engaged and got through it relatively quickly (for 700 pages and I am not a fan of high page counts). I was a bit offput by how much of it was about the occult – I don’t mind fantasy but I can’t say that’s my favourite sub-genre of it. But it was well done, although the ending felt a little rushed after the leisurely pace of the rest of it.

Because there are different sections with different narrators, inevitably some are more interesting than others. I found the early sections about Juan and Gaspar to be the most appealing, and I appreciated Enriquez’s restraint in allowing Juan to be truly unsympathetic at times. I was also left with a strong sense of place, both of the various crumbling Buenos Aires districts, and of the heavy, sleeping jungle in the north of the country.

And I think it’s a good crossover book, more fantastical than most literary readers usually go for, and more literary than the average fantasy book. An enjoyable read.

Thanks to Netgalley and Granta for the ARC

First up, there’s a LOT to like here, Enriquez’ short stories capture the length and breadth of humanity and her first(English translated) long-form is no different.

With an tightly wound web of folklore, secret societies, class struggle and Argentinian history. This book is dense, at times to it’s detriment but on the whole it does a great job of detailing the messiness of the human condition.

What is essentially three stories could have done with being told chronologically, in my eyes this would have given us more impact and the relationships could have been explored further. In an ideal world these would have been three separate books all with their own space to breathe.

Thanks to Granta for the ARC.

Our Share Of Night (by Mariana Enriquez)

It’s not often I put a book aside onto the Did Not Finish pile, but sometimes I just have to admit defeat. Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share Of Night, is one such book. Usually I would persevere, but at 700 or so pages a decision had to be made how long I would struggle, and by page 100 I realised it was going nowhere - and not particularly fast.

The basic idea of the story is intriguing, and many of the characters are interesting and well realised, if not exactly likeable. The setting and cultural background to the story is unique and drips with detail, but in spite of all the positives the book reads like a road tale with no destination.

I’m certain it does actually get somewhere - it must - but some urgency in the journey would not have gone amiss. There was simply a point when the meandering of the lead character put me in mind of someone who didn’t have any urgent place to be.

To add another thorn in (this) readers side, that lead character was wholly and completely dislikeable. He would randomly consider leaving his child to fend for himself, and would casually consider beating the boy if he didn’t fall in like quickly enough. Even though the man was torn up about the death of his wife, I could still muster no feeling for him, as I thought how horrid she must have been if she married such a man in the first place.

I’ve heard a great deal about Mariana Enriquez, seen her listed on many lists of best horror authors of recent years, and I may even try another from her at some point, maybe, but I won’t be in much of a hurry to.

Our Share of Night is a complex novel of dark powers, military dictatorship, and a powerful family, set across decades in Argentina. Gaspar's father Juan has been at the whims of the Order for years, as a "medium" able to commune with the ominous Darkness and take part in bloodthirsty rituals. Juan is desperate to keep Gaspar safe from these people, partly his family, but the Order has a dark history and plenty of wealth and power in Argentina. Across decades, Gaspar, Juan, and others try to evade the Order's plans, amidst political turbulence and changing times.

The book is split into various sections, each spanning a certain period of time, and this works very well in telling the story, from Juan on a road trip with young Gaspar to Gaspar's mother in 1960s London to an article detailing the cover up of the deaths of political activists. Though the novel is pretty epic in length, the different sections break it up in a way that means it doesn't feel too slow, particularly as it uses different perspectives. Again, these perspectives could make the book confusing, but I didn't find this, and you end up quite invested in some of the characters (and horrified by others - the book really explores the dark side of humans confronted with power and malevolent magic).

As I would expect from having read Enriquez's story collection The Dangers of Smoking In Bed, this novel combines malevolent magic and horror with politics and humanity, resulting in a rich book that I enjoyed more than the story collection, possibly because it felt so fully realised. I don't always get along with a book so long and split into parts, but this one worked for me, with enough going on and some sections that are quite different to others, whilst others feel like a continuation of Gaspar's story. I particularly enjoyed the flashback type section focusing on Gaspar's mother that was set in London in the late 60s and 70s, as the way that the occult stuff was mixed with the hippy and counterculture stuff was really interesting.

Our Share of Night is a long novel that spans genres, looking at power and brutality in a real and supernatural context, exposing Argentinian history and relationships between children and parents. I enjoyed the weaving together of magic, horror, and real violence, which was powerful, but also the focus on characters, flawed and angry and secretive.

It's not you, it's me.
I can see why this novel has such rave reviews and a South American cult following to match, but I was a tad bored during the first half. The writing is beautiful, and Mariana's ability to portray relationships is second to none. I instantly fell in love with Gaspar, he's everything a six year old should be - innocent, curious, naïve. Watching him navigate the world with new eyes was heartwarming (and creepy). I found the plot to be unique, but with the familiarity of the ghost stories and folklore we all love.

I recommend grabbing this translated work if you're a fan of quiet horror novels with strong characters.

I struggled with this from the get go due to the continuous prose. There are no speech marks or anything and it almost feels like one long run on sentence. I couldn't get past that, so had to put it down after not very much I'm afraid. Did not work for me.