Wow, “Our Share of Night” by Mariana Enríquez, is an absolutely stunning work of horror. This book gave me nightmares! The plot centers around a mysterious group called The Order, who worship and serve a god they call the Darkness, and who desire to be as gods themselves and live forever. Members of The Order will stop at nothing to reach their goals, even if it means sacrificing their own family members. The Darkness is powerful, but The Order cannot summon it without a person they call a “medium,” who has the power to bring forth the Darkness so it can speak…and be fed. The summoning comes at great cost to the medium, and they do not survive long. When Juan, the current medium, has a son who exhibits the same talents, he knows he must escape the grasp of The Order in order for his son to survive. Thus begins their attempt to escape the powerful clutches of The Order and change their fates.

Set against the backdrop of Argentine history, “Our Share of Night” is a deeply riveting and atmospheric novel. It is a very dark and complex book; it’s definitely a challenging read. And though it is a lengthy read, it is best read slowly so that the reader can soak up every mystifying moment. I can see why this book is being billed as one of the best horror novels of the year; it certainly terrified me!

Thank you NetGalley and Hogarth for granting me the privilege of reading an advanced digital copy of one of my most anticipated reads of 2023. It did not disappoint!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a free e-book copy of the English translation of Our Share of Night. This review is my honest opinion.

I recommend this novel to fans of horror and suspense. This story had me hooked from the very beginning. The characters were interesting, clearly with more going on beneath the surface that was revealed over time. The family intrigue was very powerful. I also really liked the descriptions and sense of atmosphere the author created. The horror elements added a lot to the story.

★ ★ .5 (rounded up on Goodreads)

For the most part… I would say that I enjoyed this? Heavy emphasis on the question mark because I didn’t enjoy it this book as a whole, but in pieces. And for me this pieces were stand outs, are what saved this story.

There is A LOT of unnecessary backstory and tangent storylines, shifts in pacing, jumping between flashbacks and present with multiple POV snippets that, while yes, they provide some additional context to characters and parts of the main plot, they don’t really matter to the first two sections of this book (250 or so pages) and the last twenty pages.

That said, this easily could have been half the length and really impactful and effective. For a second, I thought the start of part 3 was going somewhere interesting, but by section 2 it’s clear we’re shifting gears and we’ve completely lost the main character and changed stories. While it’s cool to have some of that backstory it’s got absolutely nothing to do with how the story ends and basically parts 3-5 (making up 80% of the book) are filler content with no real purpose.

I will say there’s one part in the middle that’s relevant to the end, and even so it’s only a handful of pages. Everything else, unimportant.

The mysterious, dark, and challenging fast paced nature of the first two sections is more exciting than the ending, I was underwhelmed. If you make it to the end and can look past the middle sections, the best part about it is that the story does come together and everything that Juan had planned for Gaspar comes full circle so there is a sense of closure. Given how large this book is and how much time it takes the reader to get through, having closure by the end for both Juan and Gaspar is nice.

This is definitely not for everyone. While I can say for the most party I enjoyed it, I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone to read. The pacing and shift in story line reminds me of Imaginary Friend, which is really hard to get through and redundant by the end.

thank you Random House for this ARC, courtesy of Netgalley. Publication date for “Our Share of Night” is Feb 7, 2023.

Family centered occult saga with dark fantasy and supernatural elements. The writing itself was gorgeous, but at 600 pages the story was bloated and meandering with too much backstory that ultimately felt pointless. Pretty devastated that this didn’t work for me, but highly recommend the authors previous work.

Well I sure am glad this book was translated because I really enjoyed it and know many people who will too. Its definitely character focused and travels over decades and multiple people lives. A fathers goal to keep his son away from his mothers vampiric cult of a family, who’s life’s quest is immortality. This story is complex and heart wrenching,

I was expecting such great things from this book and kept forgiving things that bothered me until about halfway into the book, I reached my breaking point. Much child abuse, over bloated writing that often times led nowhere or took forever to reach the point. The ending was just so so and left the reader and main character in endless hope.
I will note however that the cover art for this book, especially the UK edition, is excellent.

I enjoyed this a lot - it’s well plotted, very immersive, and delightfully creepy. Though there were moments which lagged a bit for me, everything comes together nicely and even the parts that don’t directly contribute to the plot create this complex social world and the unsettling atmosphere that scaffolds the entire novel. I hope we get more of Enriquez’s novels in translation!

This is a nasty little piece of work. It is horror and fantasy that, at its best, is punctuated by the political and socioeconomic reality of Argentina in the 1960s-1990s. This strong sense of place--even of the Other places--usually means the novel moves along at a clip, but it drags when it loses that connection. (For example, I found my mind wandering when reading the portion of the book set in London.)

The story also garners strength from its central character, Gaspar, who is subjected to heartbreaking physical, mental, and emotional abuse, mostly by his father, Juan, even though it theoretically comes from a place of love and protection. (The amount of times I rolled my eyes and sighed "ok Juan" every time he pulls the "I DID THIS TO SAVE YOU FROM THE ORDER" routine...) It was hard to read, but it also made it more satisfying to watch Gaspar gain his own sense of power amidst the darkness. While I expected Mariana Enriquez to lean more into the lore of the tumultuous, grisly underworld she created, these more human moments broke up the story more--there are atrocities and brutality, but at least they vary in type.

Steel yourself before starting this one. It's going to be one hell of a ride.

Our Share of Night is a genre-bending epic and an equally enthralling novel that paints the extent to which corruption and wealth can drive us.

Mariana Enriquez is the author of two short story collections previously translated into English - The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire. For readers who have read her previous works you will already have an idea of the tone and brutality that is present in Our Share of Night. Our Share of Night delves deeper in the occult, and a violent, erotic world. Some of the elements you can expect to see in this work range from music, journalism, paranormal encounters, secrets, things of the occult, and monsters. Some parts have a Stephen King-esque feeling to them that are particularly reminiscent of IT. We have a setting rich with history, and a large cast of characters; we follow some of them as children through their adulthood. Some are haunted by previous encounters with the paranormal.

The book is set in the decades during and after Argentina's military dictatorship. The atrocities and violence of the Dirty War are woven into the backdrop of our narrative. We primarily follow a father and son, Juan and Gaspar. Juan is a medium for a powerful cult called the Order. Aware of their disregard for human lives, Juan will go to any lengths to protect his son Gaspar from them, even if it means committing unspeakable acts himself. The father-son story sandwiches the narrative of Gaspar's mother, who is an anthropologist documenting the local customs and mythology of indigenous tribes, in particular the Guarani people of Paraguay.

Our Share of Night is an immense and violent story. It is not for the faint of heart.
Although it is an extremely bleak story filled with horrors, I found myself completely enthralled with the book. It is not an easy read and at times it's also not an enjoyable read. It's akin to a train wreck that you can't look away from, with its mystifying story that compels one to want to know what will happen next.

TW: Extreme violence towards children, brutality, mass murder, torture, dismembering of bodies, cruelty and much more.

I've been hearing about Enriquez in the same breath as Bolano for a while now. So when I was lucky enough for Hogart to pass me an advanced copy of her first novel to be translated into English, this translation by Megan McDowell, I was incredibly excited to read it. I've finally finished it and I can confirm it lives up to the hype. The overarching story is that of a child born into a cult and seemingly destined to be its next medium, and his parents' efforts to keep him away from the cult. Enriquez tells us this story through seemingly different narravites in parts, with various modes of storytelling, including one section written as an unpublished final article of a dead journalist, and the way they all end up coming together is gorgeous. It marries the political unrest of Argentina with dark cultic forces in high society, and the story of the family caught up in all of it. If you're looking for a good marriage of political reality and cultic horrors and a fantastic story that catches people unaware in its claws, you'll want to pick this up on 2/7. Highly recommended.

The best word I can think to sum up this book is just "interesting." It goes to a lot of different places over the course of its 600 pages, which at times really made me wonder what the story was even meant to be about, but there's a common thread through the whole book: this is about the lengths to which people are willing to go in order to get what they want. It centers around a father who is determined to protect his son from people who would do anything to keep and achieve power, and the effects of his desperation on his son's life. That storyline being intertwined with Argentina's history of exploitation and abuse was a really clever move and opened the novel up to explore its themes through multiple avenues.

That said, this book really dragged for me a lot of the time. I was interested in the characters and relationships and seeing what was going to happen, but I felt like there were so many diversions from the main plot that made the book too long and had me wishing I could be finished with it already. That could've also been because of the writing style, and it's likely I missed out on a lot of the depth of this book because I don't have the cultural knowledge to fully understand its context, but yeah. Altogether it just made the book not as enjoyable for me personally.

I will literally read anything Enriquez writes. To quote Lady Gaga, "talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference, put it in a blender, sh*t on it, vomit on it, eat it, give birth to it."

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. I thought it was very unique but the internalized trauma within the characters made me a little uncomfortable.

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.

Over all, this was a book that I personally mesh with. I can completely see why other people have, and will continue to enjoy this, but there were parts in here that I couldn’t get past. I couldn’t get past the contradiction of our protagonist, wanting so strongly to protect his son, and simultaneously admitting to abusing the boy himself. Honestly, there were just so many times in the duration of reading this that I contemplated DNFing.

I do highly recommend the audiobook because the narrator, Frankie Corzo did a fantastic job. Her voice, her cadence, and the way she presents this story was the only way I was able to push through.

Thank you to Hogarth/Random House for this Netgalley arc!

Our Share of Night is the first novel translated into English by the renowned Mariana Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed). Enriquez uses the violent history of Argentina's military dictatorship as a backdrop to explore how far a father will go in order to protect his son from a fate that feels inevitable. Told in a meandering writing style, the experience is tense and uncomfortable, like walking home at night and knowing someone is following you and getting closer - but each time you turn back, you see no one.

We spend the first part of the book following the perspective of Juan Peterson, whose wife has just passed away, leaving him alone with his son, Gaspar. Juan, who we quickly find out has a weak and vulnerable heart, is a medium for the Order, a cult with immense wealth and power who worship the Darkness in hopes to learn the secret to immortality. The Order controls Juan's life and his body, and he realizes he must do anything, at all costs, to prevent the same fate for Gaspar. This defiance against a powerful organization acts as the foundation from which the reader then spans out, as we follow different narrators throughout the next decade who lead us in seeing whether or not Juan is ultimately successful.

There is so much that I enjoyed about reading Our Share of Night: the representation and discussion of Argentinian history and politics, the macabre horror and magic that challenges the reader to look away, and the unreliable, morally grey narrators that provide no comfort as we piece everything together. There is a powerful message about intergenerational trauma - as a result of political forces such as violent dictatorship and revolution - and how hard it is to avoid passing down this darkness between generations. The relationship between Juan and Gaspar is the most powerful example of this, and their complex "love" was the most poignant aspect of the novel. It's also impossible not to address the absolute EVIL prevalent throughout -- in the women of the order, the rituals, the Darkness, the Other Place -- and there are some images described that I don't think will ever leave my head. While I can't say it was something I enjoyed, per se, it was extremely thrilling.

Unfortunately, despite these aspects I liked, the length and slow pace of the book ultimately harmed my enjoyment of its explorations. Certain paths the writing takes felt pointless and redundant, with some characters having a weight that felt undeserved or served very little in the overall plot (I'm thinking of the section of the book that was dedicated to the doctor, the amount of time spent in London, among other POVs). The relationships, outside of Juan and Gaspar, often lack consistency in their depth or felt rushed because of time skips (ironic, because it's a long book). I'm curious if this is a result of translation, or what other folks feel.

Ultimately, I think that this is still a book I would recommend for those seeking translated horror with a gothic twist. It's certainly not for those with a weak heart (ha) nor for those who despite meandering stories. While this wasn't a favorite of mine, I think there is much I will continue to chew on for a while; and I am only excited for more of Mariana Enriquez's work to be translated!

A challenging read that merges horror and the fraught politics of Argentina. While I'm certain others will find it illuminating and terrific, she lost me. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I DNF at about 30 percent but would urge fans of world literature and literary fiction to give it. a try.

(Also posted on Goodreads on 1/30/2023).

(ARC from NetGalley)

I enjoyed this book. I really liked the dark world and all the magic blended with real events. It had some really good, dark moments and creepy scenes.

I found the book a little slow at times and I was bored, and sometimes the world got a little complicated for me.

Great themes, eerie image of a demon I will have stuck in my head, and super imaginative!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5306765612

I loved everything about this book. I was captivated from start to finish!

This novel was twisted, brilliant, and dark. The writing was incredible, leading to such a well-paced novel that was so addictive!

I cant wait to get my hands on a physical copy of this one!

This is such an epic and horrifying story. It starts with a father and son on a road trip. Soon you learn that this will not be a simple story. Sure there are ghosts, dead people, murder, gore, violence, and abuses all surrounding the context of a cult. However, it is also the story of people with strong emotional and familial ties being coerced financially and through otherworldly means. Each character we follow is struggling with trauma, and at the same time, they take actions that show them both as victims and, at times, perpetrators. On top of that, the backdrop is the military dictatorship in Argentina, state repression, and its aftermath.

This complex story grabbed me and has not let me go. If you can handle it, I highly recommend it.

Our Share of Night is a slow build of dread and unease as the reader follows a family in Argentina dealing with a horror-inducing Darkness. This book has a noir feeling to it when it comes to pacing, and an overall long journey that ends with a satisfying conclusion that maintains the thread of family connections, chosen and not-chosen. This was a rough read at times, but I'm glad I read it. This book is a journey in itself, and the quiet horrors stuck with me more than I thought they would. Overall, I'd recommend this to someone looking to deeply dive into a long noir-horror mystery tale.

Some content notes to be aware of: sexual assault, gore, body horror, homophobia, child abuse.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s Argentina, this is a sweeping family epic horror story, mysterious and twisted. The Order has lived through the years by exploiting the power of the medium. The current medium, Juan, has lived a harsh life - but also complicated further, by marrying into one of the families, and having a son, Gaspar. With his wife Rosario dead from a bus accident, Juan is left to parent Gaspar. And protect him from the Order, who see Gaspar as their next medium.

This was complicated and twisty and dark, fully of dread and disaster. It’s a heavy book (literally and figuratively), with a brutal family obsessed with the Darkness which drives the Order, and a little boy trapped by destiny. Enriquez’s story is so unsettling and brilliant, while McDowell’s translation maintains such a dark and creepy tone. Messed up but compelling.