I’ve read a lot of horror books over the last two years. But my absolute favorite is easily Mariana Enriquez’ Our Share of Night. The book was originally published in 2019 in Argentina, but it only got an English translation in 2023. While it doesn’t quite reach Stephen King lengths, at nearly 600 pages, I’d say it still counts as an epic.
There are certainly scary and gruesome moments in the story involving ancient gods, a powerful cult, and brutal ritual violence. But as is usually the case with the best horror, the supernatural here is a stand-in for real-world terrors. In this case, Enriquez uses the occult to explore Argentina’s history of political violence, familial trauma, and the unchecked greed of the wealthy elite.
The story spans several decades, bouncing from the 1980s, back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, before jumping forward to the late ‘90s. It primarily follows the story of widower Juan and his son Gaspar as they attempt to escape the clutches of a group of wealthy occultists known as the Order. Juan is a medium used by the Order to commune with the Darkness, a sort of unknowable Lovecraftian deity that the Order believes can grant them immortality.
While I find it hard to be genuinely terrified by a book, there are several passages in Our Share of Night that really got under my skin.
Juan was born to a poor immigrant family, but when his abilities are discovered, the Order takes him from his family and makes him a tool in their rituals, which they know will wear him down and lead him to an early grave. Juan wants to save his son from suffering the same fate. The relationship between the two is expertly handled by Enriquez, who manages to capture the complexities and intimacy of parenthood in a way few others have.
Unfortunately, between tender moments where Juan holds his son as he cries for his lost mother, he is often cruel and abusive. While he is willing to go to great lengths to protect his son from the external threat of the Order, he can’t protect Gaspar from his own rage and emotional instability. Like most of the characters in the book, Juan is both a perpetrator and a victim of abuse, by his family and by an uncaring system that treats human beings as disposable.
Our Share of Night is a heavy novel that can feel bleak at times, as it navigates graphic depictions of child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, authoritarianism, and addiction. And, at times, the prose can feel a bit clunky due to the translation, but it’s still one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read. (I’m planning to re-read it soon.)
The characters that Enriquez conjures are complex — almost nobody is a purely good person, and people’s motivations can be murky. The gothic world she’s crafted is grounded in the very real political trauma suffered by Argentina during the Dirty War of the late 1970s, in which at least 22,000 people were either killed or disappeared. The lore of the Order is detailed and chilling.
While I find it hard to be genuinely terrified by a book, there are several passages in Our Share of Night that really got under my skin. One scene in particular, in which Juan communes with the Darkness in a graveyard, stuck with me for days — not because of any gruesome description of violence or gore, but purely on the strength of Enriquez’s ominous writing.
Our Share of Night is also at times a quite sexy novel. While horror and sex are often tightly intertwined (see almost any vampire story), it’s not an afterthought here. There are multiple sex scenes that add to the air of hedonism that surrounds life among the Order. Juan is described as being an almost irresistible Adonis — tall, blonde, muscular — but he is also deathly ill, suffering from a chronic heart condition since childhood that could realistically end his life at any given moment. Enriquez plays with this juxtoposition deftly, as well as Juan’s sexuality. She also prominently features several queer characters.
Mariana Enriquez has quickly become one of my favorite modern authors. I’ve now read her two short story collections as well, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire. Those are great, but it’s Our Share of Night that I can’t seem to get out of my head.
You can find it on most e-book stores, but I highly recommend you go and buy a physical copy at your neighborhood independent bookshop or support your local library.
