Over the past couple of years, I’ve delved into numerous horror novels, but Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night stands out as my top pick. Originally released in Argentina in 2019, this gripping tale finally reached English readers in 2023. While it falls a bit short of Stephen King’s typical tomes, its nearly 600 pages certainly qualify it as a sweeping saga.

The novel is rife with chilling and macabre scenes featuring ancient deities, a formidable cult, and harrowing ritualistic violence. Yet, like the finest horror stories, the supernatural elements serve as a metaphor for genuine horrors. Enriquez masterfully uses the occult to delve into Argentina’s tumultuous history of political strife, the scars of family trauma, and the insatiable greed of the elite.

Spanning from the 1980s back to the ’60s and ’70s, then leaping into the late ’90s, the narrative centers on widower Juan and his son Gaspar, who are on the run from a wealthy group of occultists called the Order. Juan, a medium, is exploited by the Order to communicate with the Darkness, an enigmatic, Lovecraftian entity they believe holds the key to immortality.

Juan’s journey began in a poor immigrant family, but his psychic abilities caught the Order’s attention. They tore him away from his roots, using him as a pawn in their life-draining rituals. Aware of his own mortality, Juan is desperate to shield his son from the same grim destiny. Enriquez skillfully portrays the nuanced bond between Juan and Gaspar, capturing the essence of parenthood with remarkable authenticity.

Amidst tender scenes of Juan comforting Gaspar over the loss of his mother, his darker side emerges through bouts of cruelty and abuse. Despite his determination to shield Gaspar from the Order’s external threats, Juan struggles to control his own anger and emotional turmoil. Like many characters in the novel, Juan embodies both the roles of abuser and victim, shaped by a callous system that regards human lives as expendable.

Our Share of Night is a heavy novel that can feel bleak at times, as it navigates graphic depictions of child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, authoritarianism, and addiction. And, at times, the prose can feel a bit clunky due to the translation, but it’s still one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read. (I’m planning to re-read it soon.)

The characters that Enriquez conjures are complex — almost nobody is a purely good person, and people’s motivations can be murky. The gothic world she’s crafted is grounded in the very real political trauma suffered by Argentina during the Dirty War of the late 1970s, in which at least 22,000 people were either killed or disappeared. The lore of the Order is detailed and chilling.

While I find it hard to be genuinely terrified by a book, there are several passages in Our Share of Night that really got under my skin. One scene in particular, in which Juan communes with the Darkness in a graveyard, stuck with me for days — not because of any gruesome description of violence or gore, but purely on the strength of Enriquez’s ominous writing.

Our Share of Night is also at times a quite sexy novel. While horror and sex are often tightly intertwined (see almost any vampire story), it’s not an afterthought here. There are multiple sex scenes that add to the air of hedonism that surrounds life among the Order. Juan is described as being an almost irresistible Adonis — tall, blonde, muscular — but he is also deathly ill, suffering from a chronic heart condition since childhood that could realistically end his life at any given moment. Enriquez plays with this juxtoposition deftly, as well as Juan’s sexuality. She also prominently features several queer characters.

Mariana Enriquez has quickly become one of my favorite modern authors. I’ve now read her two short story collections as well, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire. Those are great, but it’s Our Share of Night that I can’t seem to get out of my head.

You can find it on most e-book stores, but I highly recommend you go and buy a physical copy at your neighborhood independent bookshop or support your local library.