In Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, Juan is still grieving the death of his wife Rosario in a horrible accident—but despite his rapidly failing heart, he has no time to rest. He has to summon the Darkness for the cult he serves, the cult that surveils him at every turn, the cult his wife was born into, the cult that might have killed her. But more importantly, he has to find a way to hide his son, Gaspar, from the cult. To keep him from becoming a medium, used as Juan has been used his whole life, to keep him from accessing his already apparent powers.
This book is less outright horror and more of a simmering, dreadful gothic, all sharp claws and dark shadows and grisly scars. Migraines threaten and hearts pound in this novel about generational trauma and capitalist corruption; the story of the Reyes and Mathers families is braided into Argentina's history, and into its long era of oppression, torture, silenced protest, and disappearances—a world in which people disappear and no one can question it. How can an untouchable, threatening bastion of power be pulled down? Can it happen from the inside, can it be changed, or must it be torn apart, leaving nothing left?
The story follows Gaspar into his young adulthood—it flashes back into Rosario and Juan's youth—and all these turns and twists allow for an exciting web of small discoveries (as the novel went on, I created an increasingly complex family tree in the back of the book). The characterizations are excellent. The villains are built out. Characters are given sympathy without insisting we redeem them. It's a story about how silence rarely benefits anyone, about how the young become haunted by the legacies, secrets, and violence their parents wanted to protect them from. Like most gothics, the horror is beside the point (though it's satisfyingly terrifying, sometimes gory, sometimes creepy and haunted, very cinematic and gave me goosebumps in all the worst ways)—the real story here is a deep social one about history and what we try, and fail, to bury.
I received this book in exchange for an honest review. This was one of my most anticipated books of the year and it didn't disappoint—I ate up 608 pages in 5 days. Mariana Enríquez remains the master of social and psychological horror.
Strong content warnings for violence, body horror, domestic & emotional abuse, trauma; also warnings for suicidal ideation/suicide, homophobia, ableism, substance abuse, r-slur, self-harm.
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