Absolutely insane and completely brutal. Absolutely gorgeous writing, it sucks you in and keeps you there. I wish it had been maybe a tad more atmospheric, but a dark masterpiece.

Captivating, enthralling, emotional, and so deeply complex. While Enriquez’s book comes in at over 500 pages, it reads like a breeze. Full of family tragedy and occult history, this book is the definition of a hauntingly wild ride that satiated my need for a deeply personal supernatural story. Trust me when I say, you will not want to miss out on this one. It’s incredibly unique, but also familiar. It’s full of the textures of life in all of its forms. Truly a pleasure to read!

Even though the characters draw the reader in, it is the length of the book that pulls this reader out of the story. After reading for days and days, it was a shock to discover that I was only 40% into the almost 800 page book. It is then that I notice that there are superfluous details that simply don't move the plot closer to the climax. Satellite stories take up chapters of details that don't get me to Gaspar's outcome. And at 40%, even though I really want to know if all of Juan's horrible parenting gets Gaspar to safety, I can't stay with this book. I loved the first 30%, but the last 10% took it out of me. Maybe I'll just read the last 10% to find out what happens.

Our Share of the Night isn’t like anything I have read before. It’s a complex story with overlays of magic, supernatural and occult practices set in the backdrop of the unrest in Argentina and the atrocities of the regime. There are a number of emotions as well as strange practices that don’t all make sense. I am glad that as the story is unfolding, by the end of part one, we have a good context for the main characters – Juan and his son, Gasper. The intensity of Juan’s powers and the possible inheritance of the same for Gasper and their implications are starting to reveal themselves amidst a political plot in the Order. I was intrigued to read more and had no idea what is going to happen next.

The pace of the book is erratic and with all the different perspectives that we get, sometimes it was very hard to get into a new part of the book. If this book had been in chronological order, I won’t have minded the different POVs so much.

The first part sets a good stage for Juan and Gasper’s characters and for all the parts that follow them, I enjoyed the story. I cared about their relationship, the person Gasper was becoming, the consequences of Juan hiding things from Gasper, Gasper’s friendships… Everything was interesting and engaging. The rest of the parts showed the true horror of the cult and the magic Juan was capable of exercising. They also did a helped make the story cohesive at the end.

Juan was an interesting choice of medium, considering he had a weak heart. Yet, his control and precision with using Darkness is something I only appreciate now in hindsight. I wanted more exploration of his powers, especially the telepathy. If he had taught Gasper, I can’t even imagine how powerful Gasper would have become. Our Share of Night portrays the changing parent-child relationships through Gasper as well as his friends’ families. I loved the band of friends: Adela and Vicky and Pablo and how they were almost haunted by different things in life.

First, a thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me read an eArc of this book.

I wanted to like this. By god, so badly I wanted to like this. I heard nothing but good things about this author, and the cover is amazing. Supernatural horror? Cults? Non-American? Sign me up!

But honestly, I felt zero connection, sick interest or otherwise, in any of these characters. This setting of a weird secret society and The Darkness could have been really interesting, but it just... didn't do it for me.

DNF at 21% of the way through. I just have too many books on my TBR and too many ARCs to keep trying to make this one work for me.

Our Share of Night is a tome of a book, dealing with complex histories of Argentina that are horrific in their own rite, but Enriquez's use of the occult takes that horror to new heights. This makes Our Share of Night both difficult to read at points but also unforgettable and incredibly affecting. The story of a father's violent love of his son and the lengths he will go to protect him, set against a tumultuous and dangerous backdrop, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

links to review tk.

I'm just starting to read horror and I'm glad I started with this one. This was a book with a really in-depth magical system. It was a very involved system in which the witches are subjected to a lot of pain and anguish that I did become a little disturbed.

I thought the writing was fantastic. I thought the characters were all so well written, and fully formed. This author did such a wonderful job at truly painting a picture. I really enjoyed our protagonist’s determination to stop at nothing to protect his son from the family practices in which he is trying to escape from.
#netgalley #ourshareofnight

Set against the backdrop of the Argentinian regime, Our Share Of The Night, joins the ranks of Latin-American novels that explore the many layers of reality and terrifying monsters. Mythology, inter-generational horrors, socio-economic exploitation and a variety of voices make this book a must read if horror is your genre.

For most my of my adult life, I thought that horror just wasn’t for me. I associated the genre with older, male authors like H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, whose work I never found especially compelling or relatable. The kind of characters and fears that their fiction centered seemed very distant from my lived experience, and their massive popularity placed them on a cultural pedestal that I simply wasn’t interested in challenging. What’s the point, I thought, in reading things that were designed to scare you? Isn’t real life terrifying enough?

All this changed when I stumbled upon a short story collection titled Things We Lost in the Fire. I read it because it came highly recommended by people I trusted, and only realized it was horror halfway through the book. By that point, I was so captivated by Mariana Enríquez’s twisted imagination that I just wanted more. So I started dipping my toes in horror fiction written by women and queer people, only to discover that I did, in fact, love to read stuff that was designed to scare me. What makes horror good, I learned, is precisely its ability to sublimate societal and cultural anxieties into fictional scenarios; to create an imaginary bubble—a safe space, if you will—where nightmarish ideas can be explored and dissected with no real-life consequence.

And it’s this facet of the genre that Enríquez excels at. Her ability to explore the dark side of womanhood, family relations, and Latin American history has always been apparent in her writing, but her craft reaches new heights in Our Share of Night. This monumental novel grapples with four decades of Argentinian history, dissecting how collective traumas caused by dictatorship, colonialism, and poverty impact individual characters and their relationships with one another.

Through the eyes of a violent, traumatized father and his young son, we come face to face with the machinations of a corrupt cult whose ultra-rich members will stop at nothing to become even more powerful. Greed, the author seems to say, is an insatiable, self-cannibalizing monster that exploits the marginalized before eventually destroying the privileged, too. I know cannibalism has basically become a trend in contemporary fiction, but Enríquez uses this trope with skill and purpose to make a point about how the ruling classes have historically used occultism to try and further their agendas. Speaking of which: I don’t know who wrote the copy for the American edition, but this is very much not a vampire novel. How anyone could read the book and come to this conclusion is a mystery to me.

At the end of the day, all I can say about Our Share of Night is that it was my favorite book I read last year. It cast a spell on me that I haven’t been able to break ever since. Occasionally, I’ll find myself eyeing my copy on the bookshelf, tempted to pick it up and re-read a passage or two; but the anguish and distress it caused me are still so fresh in my mind that I can’t bring myself to do it. Turning the last page, I felt just like Gaspar, haunted by horrors too ancestral to be fully grasped by the human mind; only in my case, it was the monsters conjured by Mariana Enríquez’s imagination that I found impossible to shake off.

This book took a month of my life and f'd me up. Do not be daunted by its 650 pages; I was fully transported by page 5 and dying to know how this would end. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Our Share of Night is a novel from acclaimed Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, and is apparently (per the publisher statement that comes with the novel) her first novel to be translated into American English, even as her earlier novels were well acclaimed internationally. The novel is a 600 page historical fantasy horror novel, taking place largely in Argentina and Britain from the 1960s through the 1990s, and deals heavily with the Argentine politics of the time, as the nation struggles with a dictatorship, than a struggling democracy, and political and economic crises during and thereafter. Of course these historical events are often in the background (but well present) as the novel deals largely with a father and son who are involved with a Cult dedicated to a Supernatural Darkness that consumes, marks and sacrifices in exchange for cryptic messages about immortality - a cult led by a trio of rich loaded and politically connected families with little concern for who they destroy along the way.

The result is a fascinating novel which at times feels overwritten - with excessively long paragraphs and long passages without interruption - that somehow still is enthralling, as the story takes place in six parts that jump forward and backwards in time and perspective to reveal what is happening and what has already happened. So we get large parts taking place from the perspectives of the father Juan and mother Rosario in which they reveal their actions within the cult and their connections to the supernatural but also two large parts taking place from the perspective of their son Gaspar, who is ignorant of what dark magic his parents are/were a part of and why his father is acting strange and occasionally violent, and just trying to grow up and live his own life with his three friends. There's some strong themes here of class, of family, and some horrifying moments to go along with it, although I do think the novel falters a bit in the end when it all has to come together ridiculously quickly.

TRIGGER WARNING: Child Abuse, Rape off page, Torture off page, Mass Murder, and Mental Illness. One part deals heavily with trauma and how different people experience it, etc. Nothing done gratuitously, but serious topics are of issue in this book.
--------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------
1981 Argentina is a country gripped in a dictatorship that maintains a terrifying grip on power. In the midst of this, a sick man Juan, and his son Gaspar, makes a trip by car through the countryside, taking care not to run into Government forces. But Juan is no ordinary man, he is the medium for the supernatural monstrous power known as the Darkness, a power which is worshipped by the secret Order known as the Cult of the Shadow. Juan not only can summon the Darkness, which consumes and marks those too close all the while whispering mad secrets to others, but can see echoes of the dead and conjure demons to provide him with answers. But his beloved wife Rosario is dead and Juan cannot see her and Juan knows this must be the work of others in the Order, such as Rosario's monstrous mother Mercedes, who wish to use Gaspar as Juan's heir....or worse. To Juan's dismay, Gaspar does indeed show signs of having inherited his powers....but Juan is resolved to under no circumstances allow the Order to get their hands on Gaspar and he will do anything - no matter how monstrous or dangerous - to keep him safe.

Four years later, in 1985, Argentina is seemingly in a better place, with a newfound democracy emerging in place of the old terrorizing Dictatorship. In this new world Gaspar grows up in Buenos Aires in a house with his father, who acts strange and sometimes cruelly, along with his three friends Pablo, Vicky, and Adela, with whom he grows up and goes to school. But the Argentina in which they are growing up still holds many dangers, and for Gaspar and his friends, those dangers are not just fallout from political crackdowns, but Juan's erratic dangerous behavior and the strange things they occasionally sense around their neighborhood of the city. Strange things that seem to be coming from a mysterious abandoned house that no one seems brave enough to enter......
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've described Our Share of Night's plot by describing the setup of two of the book's more significant parts, but the above plot summary is a bit misleading - the book is not so simple or linear in its presentation. The book is divided into six parts, although two are pretty short and are rather more like interludes than full parts, with each part taking place in a different time period and place, often involving characters mentioned in a prior part but not focused upon for various reasons (like, for example, being dead). The shift from one part to another might result in a jumping forward or back in time, and several of these parts are told in third person from multiple perspectives (while one part is told in first person by a single narrator), even if a part may have a more central character around whom things revolve. The book also - and some of this may be the formatting of my ARC but I don't think so - relies on long passages without paragraph breaks as events happen and things are experienced by their third person narrators, such that you might feel overwhelmed and exhausted reading it at times.

And yet largely, this style of writing works, as the story deals with its characters who grow and struggle with both fantasy elements and real political elements for reasons that the reader (and sometimes the characters) doesn't quite understand at first, but are slowly revealed as the book jumps back and forth in time...the book does a remarkable job bringing back moments from earlier to later such that it feels rewarding to see how things come together, even as the book never quite feels too much like a chore of a puzzle. This works even as the story's genre kind of changes from part to part - Part 1 focuses on Juan and is firmly in horror fantasy, as he deals with the cult that relies on his power and wants his son Gaspar, and revolves around Juan's knowledge of what's going on....but then our next major part, Part 3, is written largely from the perspectives of Gaspar and his three friends, all of whom are completely ignorant of the cult and its magic even as some of them have ties to it they're unaware of. That third part essentially serves as a coming of age story at times, as the quartet deals with their problems and ordinary lives - Gaspar with his confusing sometimes abusive father, Vicky with her fears, Adela with her struggles to be understood about her one arm, Pablo with his growing understanding that he's gay* in a world where that is more known but still highly discriminated against, etc. Of course the horrors behind the scenes do eventually play a part, but much of Gaspar's two major parts deal with ordinary life in a highly troubling and difficult time in Argentina, dealing with trauma, queerness, abuse, relations, and more, and these parts are written really well such that you hardly mind how long you have to wonder when the fantasy horror elements will come into play before they do. Similarly Juan's part works well, as does the spoiler protagonist of the book's fourth part whose first person perspective deals a lot with hubris and wealth amidst some absolute monsters of people (while itself being a bit of coming of age).

*Notably, the book is very queer at times - Juan is bi and has lovers of both sexes and no one of importance thinks anything about it, other characters involved with the cult are either trans or non-binary based upon descriptions, and the book deals heavily in its last act with the struggles of the gay community during AIDS in Argentina.

There's a lot of strong themes here, of both the struggles of living amidst dangerous and dark times of history and of things made clear through the fantasy elements as well, most notably themes of the monstrousness of the rich and aristocratic, such as the three families who form the backbone for the horrible cult that seeks immortality that centers large parts of the story - their connections to the dictatorship and other monsters and how they act towards family, towards those they and their allies colonize, and more are utterly evil and repulsive, which is exactly what the author is no doubt going for. And like I said above, it comes together really well, so that it's really enthralling. That said, the book kind of suffers from in my opinion a rather weak ending - the final part features the fantasy elements coming into play really late, after a long section without them, and that section is resolved insanely quickly, to the point where it feels like the payoff of the finale is not earned at all. But overall, this is a fascinating book and I'd really be interested to see what others think about it.

Our Share of Night centers on Juan and his son Gaspar, their powers, and their relationship to a cult called The Order. It is deeply unsettling, super weird, meandering, extremely slow paced. There was a bit too much gore and casual child abuse for me personally, so I couldn't make it through to the end (I flagged at about 65%) but I think Enriquez's mind and writing are interesting and would be interested in trying some other work from them in the future, stomach-permitting.

Our Share of Night tells the story of a wife and mother’s untimely death and a father who is desperate to protect their son from her ungodly rich and powerful family and their evil cult of shadows.
It checked all the boxes for me: disturbing, macabre, unbelievably unsettling, blurring the lines between horror/magical realism/family saga. It was intricate and dense and hard to read at times- both due to the absolute brutality of the story itself as well as the backdrop of the military dictatorship of 1970s Argentina- but by the end, every seemingly confusing, misplaced or unnecessary little detail had been expertly weaved together to complete a much larger, stunningly dark picture.

They say that the unknown causes fear and that is what Mariana Enríquez uses in this story. Starting practically 'in medias res', it plunges the reader into some crazy characters and a sect and some rites of which we are absolutely neophytes but which we will soon learn to fear. Some horrors that emerge from the darkness and that coexist with the real horrors of an Argentina that in turn is going through its darkest moment.

Despite touching many styles, I think that paternity and father-son relationships is the one that has the most weight. How sometimes the desire to protect can lead to overprotection and cloud relationships based on secrets and silences.

Despite how much I liked this book, I must admit that it is somewhat irregular in its development and that the overwhelming force with which it starts slows down in a much more conventional middle section, to then pick up a run again. This makes me think that it could have been more rounded with a few fewer pages... but in general it is a book that stands out for the courage of the proposal, the originality and the stark way of narrating by its author. Unforgettable.

First of all -that cover-absolutly love it - the other editions are chefs kiss as well.


This took me about 3 days to read-it was a little longer than I was expecting-but every page was well worth it. beautiful prose-just really a lengthy read. This book was a little more shock horror than supernatural horror-while I enjoyed this very much-might not be every reader's cup of tea.


This was my birthday gift-as it was published literally on my birthday. I fell in love with the author's short story collection-so this book was a pre-order for me. Honestly was surprised to receive a copy and little was jumping up and down when I saw I did. So many many thanks!

I have since bought a copy of this novel for my library at home.

I want to thank Netgalley, Random House Publishing Group - Random House, Hogarth, and Mariana Enriquez for the opportunity to read and review this book!

I was a huge fan of Mariana Enriquez's chilling short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire and was extremely glad to see that the unsettling atmosphere she conjures translated well to a feature length tale. Definitely a book that will be popular with our patrons.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing a review copy.

Our Share of Night isn't easy to classify with a few tags. It's horror, gothic, speculative, magic-realism, and part coming of age. It has a flavour I have experienced only with authors with roots from Mexico and further South. It's hard to explain - more I-know-it-when-I-read-it.

I do most of my reading before going to sleep which means horror is harder to fit in as it will give me nightmares. My extended reading time is not because I didn't enjoy it, but because I needed extended daytime reading times.

OSoN takes place in Argentina from 1960 through 1997 in six parts - as I begin writing, I find myself thinking of these as movements. The timeline begins in the 1980s, goes back to 1960, into the nineties then back to the eighties for the final movement through to 1997. The political backdrop of Argentina is present throughout and I'm sure I have missed sublteties related to it. The first movement is from Juan's POV, and we see how his life has been co-opted by a cult because he is a pathway to their god. He is not well - has never truly been well - and wants to protect his son Gaspar. The second movement is almost an interstitial from a different POV giving some background to the cult/religion. The third movement is a formative time in Gaspar's life. The fourth movement goes back in time and gives an antagonist perspective. The fifth movement is another interstitial providing both another perspective and new information. The sixth movement brings everything together and is mainly told from Gaspar's POV. The ending isn't an ending so much as a good place to stop.

This is an excellent novel, just not the type that falls into my favourites. Gothic horror is too creepy for me to love it.

Queer representation throughout.

This book wasn't for me and I ended up putting it down for now. Nothing against the book as I can see why others might like it but for me it kind of dragged.

If you felt that Enriquez's story collections were too short and you want more of what she has to offer, she is here with 600 pages of it and does not disappoint. Like her stories, there is a steady beating of a rhythm building up to a climax and you are not disappointed when you get there. The usual culprits; witches, monsters, cults, remain a constant throughout the story.

This is one of those books that I feel like I will need to read again to really get what I should get out of it. The writing is absolutely beautiful and evocative, and it feels like it transports you to another world. But I wasn't always clear on what was going on in the action of the story.