First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Random House/Hogarth on February 7, 2023
Our Share of Night is a literary horror novel, a domestic drama with a supernatural twist. A father hopes that his son did not inherit his connection to the Darkness. When it becomes apparent that his son shares his ability to summon the Darkness, he wants to shield his son from his wife’s family, who expect the Darkness to reveal the secret of immortality. The son loves and hates his father. He will eventually need to confront his family, just as his father did.
The Order regards Juan Peterson as a medium, an essential bridge to the Darkness and its secrets. The Order has deep roots in England, but a branch of the family moved to Argentina, where it is ruled by the matriarch Mercedes. Juan and Rosario, the daughter of Mercedes, had a son named Gaspar. Rosario died three months before the novel begins, but Juan should still be able to speak with her. He cannot find her because she has been hidden from him. Who did the hiding?
Juan was born with a defective heart. He’s had multiple surgeries, but he knows his condition will lead to a premature death. Before he dies, Juan is desperate to find a way to keep the Order from taking control of Gaspar. The Order wants to compel Juan to allow his essence to enter Gaspar at the moment of death. The transmigration of consciousness is the secret of immortality that the Order craves. Juan wants his son to live his own life, not as a continuation of Juan and not a life of servitude to the Order.
Juan is convinced that Rosario was murdered because she wanted to protect Gaspar from the clutches of her family. When the story opens, Gaspar is only six. The Order does not know whether Gaspar has inherited the ability to become a medium. Juan learns the distressing truth when Gaspar begins to see dead people. Juan keeps that knowledge a secret from family members as he teaches Gaspar to make the dead go away.
The story spans generations as it traces the history of the Order. Mercedes is the “priestess of a god who ignores her.” She is always looking for new mediums but Juan is the best she has found. Mariana Enríquez details the rituals the Order follows to satisfy the hunger of the Darkness. Initiates willingly, even ecstatically, lose limbs when they touch the Darkness after it is summoned by a medium. It’s rare for horror novels to make the supernatural seem real rather than silly, but Enríquez has created a shadow world that seems just as real and even more frightening than the world we inhabit.
The novel’s first half focuses on Juan and his relationships with other family members who belong to the Order, including Rosario’s half-sister, with whom Juan has a complicated and intimate history. Much about Juan is complicated, from his bisexual relationships with family members to his parenting of Gaspar. Is Juan an abusive father or is he doing what must be done to protect his son?
Gaspar comes into his own when he enters an abandoned house with his friends. One of those friends is Adela, a distant relative who lost her arm to the Darkness. The door to the house is locked but Gaspar has the ability to enter locked doors. They discover that the house is larger on the inside than its outside dimensions. Adela enters a room in the house and closes the door behind her, challenging Gaspar with the only door he cannot open. Adela is never seen again (at least not in the corporeal world). Her disappearance will trouble Gaspar in the years to come. Gaspar will also be troubled by memories, or the absence of memories that would explain gaps in his life. Those memories will eventually return and illuminate Gaspar’s history with his father, but only after his father’s death.
Like many good horror novels, the story contrasts supernatural terror with the horror that is part of life in the seen world. Chapters in the second half follow several characters, often embodying a different aspect of life in Argentina at different times in the nation’s turbulent history. Pablo is one of Gaspar’s friends who entered the house with Adela. Pablo is secretly in love with Gaspar, but Gaspar is straight. As he grows older, Pablo struggles to balance his fear of AIDS — a disease that eventually claims most of his friends — with the thrill of anonymous sex. Pablo is shunned by moralistic Argentina. He still feels the hand that grasped his shoulder when he was lost in the house where Adela disappeared. Perhaps the supernatural forces that haunt him are symbolic of the other fears that torment gay men in Argentina.
Vicky was also in the house with Gaspar and Pablo. Ten years later, she’s a talented medical student, with an almost supernatural ability to diagnose hidden diseases. She wants Gaspar to believe that his occasional encounters with (the ghost of?) Adela are hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. The reader, like Gaspar, will doubt that medicine can explain the experiences that Gaspar, Pablo, and Vicky have. The novel asks whether disease and mental illness might be an outsider's explanation of perceptions they do not share or understand.
A late chapter follows a journalist who tries to investigate the story of Adela. She learns how difficult it is to find Gaspar, even when she knows exactly where he lives. Another chapter follows Gaspar as he is haunted by the ghosts of his father and Adela. Psychiatric care does no good in a country where disappearances are common and everyone feels haunted. Argentina’s military dictatorship is a version of the Darkness; its believers control the nation in the way that the Order controls Gaspar’s family.
The novel covers an impressive amount of ground without ever causing confusion. Enríquez’s crystalline prose build a supernatural world that no less sharply focused than the Argentina in which her carefully crafted characters live. Themes of family drama (a well-meaning father whose parenting is cruel because he knows no other way; a mother who shields her child from the child's controlling grandmother) will resonate with families that are troubled by violence and strife that has no supernatural origin. A strong ending resolves Gaspar’s immediate problem while recognizing that the pain of lost souls and the risk of new horrors are always a part of life. Our Share of Night sets a new bar for literary horror novels.
RECOMMENDED