Gabino Iglesias Reviews Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez (Granta 978-1-78378-673-2, £18.99, 736pp, hc) October 2022. (Hogarth US 978-0-45149-514-3, $28.99, 608pp, hc) February 2023. Cover by Debbie Glasserman.

Once in a while a novel comes along that makes you think it was written just for you. That’s how I felt about Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, a superb novel beautifully translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. A sprawling epic about dark magic, family drama, and paternal love, Our Share of Night is one of those rare nov­els that gets under your skin and keeps you glued to the pages despite coming in at about 600 pages.

Our Share of Night takes place over many years and moves back and forth in time. The novel, which mostly takes place in Argentina but also in London, starts in the early ’80s with Juan, a young father and widower, on a road trip with his young son, Gaspar. The pain of losing their mother and wife unites father and son, but their relationship is also very strained. Juan has been sick since birth, and his whole life has been plagued by health problems and the aftermath of a plethora of complicated heart surgeries. However, his health is not his main concern. Juan is gifted, and his gift has placed him at the center of a cult called the Order that expects him to use his son to continue his work. The Order is obsessed with immortality, and its members commit atrocious acts and bizarre rituals in order to achieve it, but they are also very wealthy and thus get away with everything. Juan knows he doesn’t have much time, and his two biggest concerns are reaching his dead wife, which he can’t do because someone is using magic to keep her where he can’t reach her, and protecting his son from the Order. Unfortu­nately, Juan and Gaspar don’t have many people in their corner, and Gaspar is also gifted, which means Juan must find a way to keep his gift a secret while trying to set up a safe future for him.

Our Share of Night is massive in breadth and scope. It is a novel about a father and son on the run from a powerful group that has their eyes on them at all times and, in a way, takes care of them, but it’s also a ghost story about fear and grief, a look at Argentina during the military dictatorship and its tempestuous aftermath, a horror novel about magic and the dark side of the supernatural, and a story that delves deep into an extremely complicated father and son relationship in which love is the motor behind everything but there is also plenty of emotional neglect and physical abuse. Enriquez is a fantastic storyteller who manages to deliver everything without ever bogging down the narrative despite some necessary slower parts while also juggling the large cast of characters that come in and out of Juan and Gaspar’s lives.

Magic is always present in this novel. It is a big part of everything Juan does, and even when we don’t see exactly what he’s up to because we’re seeing things from Gaspar’s perspective, we know that the occult and the supernatural are constant presences in his life. When Enriquez does show us the magic, things get even better. Our Share of Night brings to the table a mix of places and cultures (the use of the Guaraní language makes the novel richer), and it also revels in the power of the occult with a dash of syncretism. Bizarre rituals, blood sacrifices, strange symbols, dreams, children turned into monsters living in cages in­side a tunnel, apparitions, talking ghosts, contact­ing the dead, summoning a demon in a cemetery in the middle of the night, Juan’s transformations when he summons the darkness, opening doors without a key, books on occultism; if you can think of it, Enriquez made it part of this novel, and she put a unique spin on all of it. The entire novel has enough flair for lovers of literary fiction, but also features plenty of passages in which violence takes center stage and magic becomes the biggest character in the novel. This balance is just one of the many things the author gets right, and they are only a small part of the many reasons why Enriquez is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre.

A scary horror novel is a good thing, but an unsettling one is much harder to find, and Our Share of Night is profoundly unsettling. Sure, the blood rituals and the darkness that swallows people whole (or sometimes just a limb) are a bit unsettling, but things like Gaspar’s angst and his troubled relationships with his father – violent outbursts included – are the kind of things that get under your skin. When you add to that the shadow of death constantly hanging over Juan, the fear of what will happen to Gaspar, and the Order, the end result is a superb, creepy masterpiece that doesn’t resemble anything else in print right now. You will see this novel on many lists at the end of the year, and every ounce of praise it receives will be more than deserved. Those who haven’t read Enriquez should start here, and those who are already fans of her work are in for her best yet. Don’t miss this one.

This review and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.

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