Our Share of Night Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Mariana Enriquez’s highly acclaimed novel Our Share of Night is a rich, lengthy, family saga, horror story about a young man and his inheritance: an estate, a cult, and a magical strength all his own. Set in Argentina from the 1960s to the late 1990s, just before, during, and after military dictatorship, Enriquez’s sweeping novel is a dedication to disappeared people and the violence they face, wrapped around the story of a family and the terrifying God they worship. In its 588 pages (Our Share of Night (Hardcover) Published February 7th 2023 by Hogarth) you will find abandoned houses, poetry, witchcraft, the AIDS epidemic, young friendships, myths, mediums and dark entities, mass graves, protests, sex, a father’s secrets, and a young man’s journey into another realm’s hungry mouth.
The novel is broken into six parts, following our characters across decades, though not chronologically. Skipping between time periods, we collect the story’s pieces like twigs in the grass. With the book as long as it is, this can become confusing, but Enriquez includes reminders as we go. However, I do think it’s a book best enjoyed multiple times over.
In Part 1, “The Claws of the Living God,” we meet Juan and his young son Gaspar in 1981 as they make a journey from their home together to the family’s ancestral estate at Puerto Reyes for a mysterious ritual— the Ceremonial. The family are the leaders of a cult called The Order, in search of immortality. A violent, wealthy cult, they worship and seek answers from The Darkness, which Juan channels as the cult’s one and only medium— a critical asset. But Juan is dying. A chronic heart problem plagues Juan the entire trip to the estate, constantly threatening to kill him. But he persists because he is Gaspar’s only parent, after Rosario’s mysterious death. And The Order has plans for Gaspar— a new medium in his father’s place, or, more specifically, transmitting Juan from his body into Gaspar’s. The Order’s leader tells Juan,
“Juan, we’ve never had another medium even close to your caliber. We need to protect ourselves from what’s happening to you. Mediums lose their sanity. They lose their minds! It’s happened too many times. They become unmanageable, they rebel. We understand. But what the Darkness, our ancient god, is giving us must not be interrupted by a whim or fleeting mania. Not even by your illness. We have to protect ourselves from your power. The messages cannot stop just because you decide to turn against us. The Darkness is teaching us how to conquer death. It is teaching us how to contact other ancient gods. Just imagine. You must continue summoning for us. Your wife told us you wanted to stop, and we cannot allow that. And you know perfectly well that when something must be done for The Order, I don’t back down. I’m so terribly sorry. I’m more grateful to you than to anyone in this world. But I cannot allow you to leave us, or to exercise your power over us.”
Juan is desperate to find a way out for his son, but with constant body guard surveillance and wealthy, connected people keeping a close eye on them, Juan has to be clever. He must find a way to hide his son completely from The Order. To do that, he turns to magic and to his friends that orbit The Order, conjuring a powerful, protective spell that will grant Gaspar years away from their violent, greedy clutches.
In Part 2, “The Left Hand: Dr. Bradford Enters the Darkness”, we find ourselves a few years ahead, in 1983, now following Dr. Bradford, one of The Order’s most important people, in his last moments before The Darkness eats him in The Rite. This is the same doctor who performed heart operations on Juan as a child. And it was in one of the operating rooms where Juan first summoned The Darkness— a piece of night, which inspired Dr. Bradford to eventually bring Juan home with him so that he belongs to The Order. Juan’s parents were overwhelmed by him, so they were willing to give him up. But his brother, Luis, is persistent and comes to visit. Years later, Luis may be the ticket to Gaspar’s safety.
In Part 3, “The Bad Thing About Empty Houses”, Gaspar and Juan are back home in Buenos Aires a few years later in 1985-1986. Here we witness Gaspar’s childhood with his father and the life-long friends he makes— Pablo, Vicky, and Adela (who has only one arm) — as well as the strange encounter they share in an abandoned house. On Villarreal, there is an abandoned house, which Gaspar’s friend Adela is determined to go inside, seeking any clues of her missing-assumed-dead father who may have lived there. Gaspar opens the lock easily, and when he, Adela, Vicky, and Pablo enter, they find that the house is impossibly larger inside than out. They hear a strange, buzzing vibration throughout the house. They find a series of shelves holding containers of human remains. They sense someone else in the house with them. Adela recklessly slips through her friends who urge her to leave, and finds a bedroom. She waves at them, before being pulled into the room. The door slams shut. As hard as they try, the friends cannot open it. When they manage to escape and rush to get help, Adela is gone. Never found again. Her three friends survive and each experience their own guilt, each haunted by it, each infected. In the house, Gaspar wisely had told them all not to touch anything.
“It’s like it’s all radioactive. Like Chernobyl. If we touch the house, it will never let us leave.”
In Part 3, Juan also manages to mark Gaspar with a vicious injury to his arm. Gaspar struggles with the nature of the injury for years to come. Though Juan doesn’t tell him why he hurt him, Gaspar felt his father’s intention and design. But, without knowing the truth, he wonders if it was just abuse— just hurting him to hurt him.
In Part 4, “Chalk Circles”, we follow Rosario in the 1960s and 1970s when she was still alive, as she navigates her mother’s cult world and meets Juan— their love story. We learn about the cult’s history, its founding members (including Rosario’s family), its first medium, how they found The Darkness, and where the drive for immortality originated. We meet some of the younger members of The Order who are devoted to Juan, marked by his golden claws during The Rites. Together, they locate the Other Place— a haunted forest through a bedroom door. Juan decides to make an offering to the Other Place and to ask for something in return— the ability to have his own secrets from The Order, setting up what Juan is able to do for Gaspar later.
In Part 5, “The Zanartu Pit”, we meet Olga Gallardo in 1993, expanding our story into the political unrest in the country. A journalist on assignment in the village of Zanartu, she is reporting on the discovery of a mass grave from Operation Itati, “perhaps the least famous of all the genocide practice sessions carried out before the coup in March of 1976.” We learn where The Order gets some of their money: the local yerbamate workers are employees of the Isondu company, property of the powerful Reyes Bradford family— our cult leaders. We also learn of some of the revolutionaries, including Liliana Falco, who was pregnant and had a baby during the conflict. Later, we learn this is an alias for Beatriz— Adela’s mother. In a conversation, Olga learns that Adela lost her arm to The Darkness. Her mother believes that Juan offered Adela up to save his own son. She says, “Though sometimes I think he also saved her, in a way. When she disappeared into that house, he saved her. My family won’t have her anymore, they can’t use her. They hate him for that, too. There were plans for Adela.”
Back in Buenos Aires, Olga writes up an article about the Zanartu pit, but she also meanders into what she learned from Beatriz about Adela’s disappearance, including the names of the other children, like Gaspar. But when Olga goes out in search of Gaspar, she is bamboozled, unable to locate the house number, getting lost multiple times, asking neighbors for help to no avail. Juan’s protection is working, though Olga doesn’t know that. Olga gives up the search entirely and decides not to publish the article after a strange encounter on the train. A one-armed homeless man tells her on the train that she won’t be able to see “him”— Gaspar. She tries to get answers from him as he hurries off the train, but she falls between the train and the platform onto the tracks. When she is rescued, she swears off the story.
In the final Part 6, “Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky”, we return to an older Gaspar, between the years of 1987-1997. We see his new life with his uncle Luis, after his father’s death. Tormented as he is by the abandoned house, Adela, and the trauma from living with his father, Gaspar struggles even in the safe, supportive environment Luis creates for him. Luis tries to provide Gaspar with a “normal” adolescence: Luis finds him a therapist, lets him express his full range of emotions, offers activities and things to do, introduces him to his friends, but also builds a barrier between Gaspar and Vicky and Pablo. Gaspar isn’t ready to see them again after what happened to Adela and Luis knows this. Eventually, they reunite, but it takes time and healing. After Luis is murdered by The Order, Gaspar decides to travel to the ancestral home alone to face his family. I won’t spoil what happens from here.
Our Share of Night contains a few depraved scenes that earn its horror label, drawing you in with shock and disgust. Though you don’t always witness the violence itself, it’s all around you as you read; you see the evidence left behind. Much like the disappeared people in the novel, their absence is noticed, though the violence that took them may have gone unseen. Gaspar realizes after Luis’s murder, before deciding to confront his family,
“They’d tossed a body at him the way bodies were tossed in Argentina. In Argentina, they toss bodies at you. Te tiran muertos.”
Enriquez’s novel is full of bodies, body parts, and bones. Both seen and unseen. While reading, I had the distinct feeling of being watched.