There have only ever been a handful of horror books that have stuck with me, entwining into the little crevices of my brain, and then arriving in nightmares years later. Until recently, these were things like The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and more recently, anything by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Into these offerings, I bring you the novel (at least I pray it’s a novel) Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Told in wildly different styles in multiple segments, the book follows a young man named Gaspar and his unique abilities, and his father’s desperate attempt to hide them.
Juan Peterson is Gaspars’s father. He is also a Medium for a group known only as The Order. After the death of his wife, the daughter of some of the wealthiest and highest-ranking members of The Order, he is called to bring himself and his son to a ritual at the house. Juan is a conduit for something extremely dark, and it is the hope of The Order that Gaspar will share his father’s abilities. What follows is a book involving houses that are far bigger on the inside than the outside, missing children, disappearances in Argentina during some pretty shaky periods in history, and some descriptions that are never going to leave my head. The book travels from Argentina in the 1980s, to London in the 1970s, and then back to Argentina in the 1990s. The book is massive, and is best digested in small portions, as the twisted plot and body horror can get to be a bit much for anyone not well steeped in horror.
Mariana Enriquez has created something monstrously beautiful, a vicious feast of cruelty and other worlds we cannot touch. Our Share of Night is a brilliant book and I plan to read everything in Enriquez’s catalog.
Our Share of Night comes to stores February 7, 2022.
