As a child from a poor background, with serious health issues, Juan is 'adopted' by the wealthy Bradford family, ostensibly to give him the care he needs but actually to exploit him and his 'magical' abilities - for behind the facade of respectability and money the Bradford family are members of a strange cult, known as The Order, participating in demonic, horrific rituals, and Juan is a natural medium, able to make contact with the Darkness they worship.
As he grows up, he falls in love and marries into the family, but when his son, Gaspar, is born, Juan is determined that The Order will not manipulate another generation, and he begins to lay plans to ensure Gaspar's safety.

This disturbing book is hard to quantify - part horror, part political tale with parallels to Argentina's military regime, part a story of love between father and son, and the lengths one will go to to save the other. Overall though I'd say it's an examination of the corruption that too much power and wealth can bring.

It's told in sections, moving backwards and forwards in time, and the Bradford/Reyes family emerge as an untouchable clique, acting beyond moral or legal restraints, with a total disregard for anyone outside the family; imprisoning, torturing, and executing them with impunity. There are definitely echoes of Argentina's troubled past here.

Be warned - it's not a book for the squeamish. The rituals are bizarre and grotesque, full of blood-letting and mutilation. At the time of reading, I found them so disturbing that I wondered whether or not to continue, but I'm glad I did, as the story is about more than the horrors people can inflict on each other. In retrospect, I'd go so far as to say it's life-affirming; that such cruelty is now in the past, and won't be allowed to infect the future.

DNF - 40%

I so wanted to love this book, the premises is so interesting and the author is obviously so very talented a writer. However, it totally didn't hit the mark for me, I felt I was reading and reading and reading and NOTHING was happening. I gave up around the 40% mark, which sounds like hardly anything but this is a BIG book so it was a lot of pages for very little reward.

I don't know if it was a translation thing? or the book just isn't my thing …or I am just too stupid for it? who knows.

Either way not for me!

Thanks for NetGalley and publisher for the ARC (sorry I couldn't finish it!!!)

This is such a different book, it’s so long and sometimes though it feels like you’ll never finish it, you do and you get that everlasting feeling as if you’ll never read anything like this ever again like nothing will top this. I feel like I didn’t get everything right because I read it on my phone and sometimes I would get very distracted. Otherwise, if you want to read something dark, this is a book for you, but if you have commitment issues, might be very hard for you to finish this( as it was for me). I will probably buy it and read it again.

I literally have no idea how to rate this one. It's honestly so long, and is so many different things, that it isn’t fair to review it as a whole. Maybe something like this--the first 200 pages: 4⭐️, the next 300 pages: 2⭐️, the last 200 pages: 3⭐️

The first third was very refreshing, littered with gorgeous and horrific magic from a culture that I haven’t been exposed to much before. But the second 150 pages were just about a man being sick, which wasn’t interesting at all. For magical realism being my favorite genre in the world, you'd think I'd be the target audience... but the realistic bit went on for so long that it felt like all magic was lost. In one sense, it was an effective choice bc it didn’t oversaturate you with the horror and put you on the tip of your toes, waiting for it to show up again. On the other hand, 150 pages is a bit too long to wait.

I would suggest this to fans of Channel Zero. And fans of sagas that never end (...think Dune or LOTR, but with less plot.)

I’ve been a huge fan of Mariana Enríquez’s work in the past. I loved The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and The Things We Lost in the Fire. Her writing is beautiful, macabre and haunting and Our Share of Night followed in the same vein.

Our Share of Night is an elaborate, genre defying tale, at once, it is gothic, it is fantasy and it is horror. It is also a political commentary on Argentina’s dictatorship shrouded under the guise of mysticism and the occult.

The story is broken into several very lengthy parts but the narrative is mostly focused on the father-son relationship between Juan and Gasper. Juan, a medium, married into a family part of a cult known as The Order.

We begin in 1981, Juan is recently widowed and making a trip to Argentina with Gasper. Juan is desperately trying to protect Gasper from his in-laws, wealthy, sinister and part of the cult, The Order. The Order have their sights on Gasper, and Juan is willing to do anything to keep him safe - even at the detriment of their own relationship.

In 1985, we are introduced to Gasper’s friends and the bond he has between them. His relationship with Juan is even more fraught, with Juan behaving in unhinged ways. After a horrifying incident takes place, this group of friends are pushed into growing up and trying to deal with their traumas.

We are given insight into Gasper’s deceased mom, her part in The Order and her relationship with Juan. I found her backstory really interesting and enjoyed getting to know her motivations within The Order.

The novel concludes with Gasper trying to reconcile his traumas and make sense of the happenings that have been going on around him and… yeah, it’s dark. This whole novel is incredibly dark.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as I have Enríquez’s short stories - there were times this novel dragged on a bit and could have been edited down to be shorter, or broken up more with smaller chapters. There was also multiple slurs used throughout, keeping true with the timeframe of the novel, but ultimately, unnecessary.

If you’ve enjoyed any of Enríquez’s work before, Our Share of Night is definitely worth the read but check trigger warnings!

this is probably one of the darkest books ive read so far it is macabre but you cant guess what happens at each turn keeps you wondering the writing is good but this a long book and doesnt let up on the disturbing almost trying to one up each chapter with something worse it runs out of steam by the end though although this kind of horror isnt really my thing it has topics which wouldve made stop reading usually but i did want to know the ending and i wish had been a bit more optimistic in the conclusion

The Reyes and Bradford families lead an occultist group, starting in Victorian Britain and moving to ‘a mansion in the jungle surrounded by red earth’. They exploit mediums like Juan to communicate with the Darkness, which accepts sacrifices of limbs of or whole humans in exchange for knowledge.

First Juan and later his son, Gaspar, resist their greedy and powerful family with grave consequences.

Set during and after Argentina’s military dictatorship, I found the parallels between the violent response of the Order to members’ rebellion and the ‘disappearing’ of political activists and guerillas effective.

Also Halloween was the ideal time to read this book with creepy haunted houses, realistic ghosts and gory satanic rituals.

Despite the horror, there were some tender relationships, especially between Gaspar’s friends. There are great lengths that people will go to for their loved ones.

I’d say it was a bit too long and then the ending felt rushed. For a 700+ page book, I was surprised when I didn’t feel like it was wrapping up by 98% (I read it on Kindle).

There's enough in recent South American history to made hard to think about worse horrors.
This is a horror and I think it was also a sort of allegory of power and politics. It's a very long book and sometimes it drags.
It's also a good horror story featuring any possibile horror tropes and supported by excellent storyteller.
It wasn't an easy read or an entertaining read but it's an intriguing book.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

In 1985, the world watched as a thirteen-year-old girl, Omayra Sánchez, slowly died as she stood trapped in debris after a volcanic eruption in the Tolima region of Colombia. Pinned down by the ruins of her own house, Omayra's dead aunt's arms were locked around her niece's legs and feet. Given the equipment on the ground there was no way to get Omayra out. She survived for several days as gangrene and hypothermia set in; by the time she died, her fingers had become white and her eyes had turned completely black.

Even more than the legacy of the military junta in Argentina that led to the death or 'disappearance' of thousands of people, Omayra's story haunts the pages of Our Share of Night, the first of Mariana Enríquez's novels to be translated into English. Alongside these real horrors, Enríquez gives us a terrifying shadow-story that revolves around the cult of the 'Darkness', whose followers believe it can offer them eternal life despite its destructive mutilations when it manifests via a medium. When Our Share of Night opens in 1981, the only medium is Juan, a seriously ailing man born with a congenital heart condition whose body has also broken down through being forced to manifest the Darkness. Juan is desperate to protect his young son, Gaspar, who is the cult's next target - if Gaspar doesn't inherit his father's powers, they plan to transfer Juan's consciousness into Gaspar's body so Juan can live on after his impending death.

Despite its 736 pages, Our Share of Night has a straightforward plot and a small cast of characters. Even in its side-stories we focus tightly on Juan, Gaspar and the Darkness. And here, I think, is one reason why I so admired Enríquez's ambition and many of her set-pieces, but found the book such a painfully slow read. Yes, it's long, but it doesn't normally take me five weeks to get through a book of this length; I read Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise, which is almost exactly the same length, in less than two. Like To Paradise, I'd suggest that this book is best approached as a collection of novels and novellas rather than as a single work. But unlike To Paradise, the unity of theme and character between the different sections makes Our Share of Night feel much more repetitive. I think the only section that completely worked for me was the short-story-length 'The Zañartú Pit', set in 1993, where we see anthropologist Olga Gallardo exploring the remnants of these dark rites in a Guaraní village devastated by the military coup, unaware of exactly what she's getting herself into.

And maybe this was my favourite section because it really is the only section where Enríquez truly weaves together the horrors of Argentinian history and the terror of the cult of the Darkness. Throughout the rest of the novel, these are very much two separate stories, with the Darkness almost standing in for the junta rather than reflecting and illuminating it. Perhaps I am at fault here as well; I know very little about this period in Argentina and, if I knew more, the parallels might be more obvious. But I do think that Enríquez was going for something akin to Julianne Pachico's The Anthill or Violet Kupersmith's Build Your House Around My Body, which both entwine the violent history of a country (Colombia and Vietnam respectively) with more supernatural gore and horror.

Omayra, then, feels more present in the novel than anything done by the military junta because she is the figure that haunts the set of characters who are the only ones who really come to life: Gaspar's childhood friends, Pablo, Vicky and Adela. And this gives me another reason why this book was so difficult to drag myself through: ultimately, I didn't care what happened to Juan or to Gaspar. They never felt like real people to me. Perhaps this was a deliberate choice by Enríquez; touched by the weirdness of the Darkness, Gaspar is set apart from his three, more human friends. But again, I thought of another brick of a novel that I found much easier to read, and re-read: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Gaspar shares something with the traumatised Theo, but despite Theo's story meandering almost as badly as Gaspar's at times (get out of Las Vegas, please!!!), I stayed with it because I was so invested in Theo. And unlike The Goldfinch, which pulls off a stonking final section that fully repays the reader's investment, Our Share of Night manages to rush its climax.

This is a very difficult novel to rate, because despite the fact that I did not enjoy reading most of it, I know that it will absolutely stay with me; and there are sections where Enríquez's prose, as translated by Megan McDowell, is extraordinarily powerful. I'll definitely be reading Enríquez's translated short story collections. Still, the pacing is hopeless, and the horror only intermittent. 3.5 stars.

I was excited for this book as I wanted something creepy for spooky season in October. However, I found this book far too long to be necessary, the plot does not warrant the page count. There wasn’t anything particularly awful about the book I just found it lacking from what the cover and description led me to believe it would be. Perhaps meanings got lost in the translation because I’ve noticed that Portuguese reviews are very highly complementary. I think I just preferred the authors shorter stories that packed more of a punch.

I am sure that this is an excellent read for some people, but for me? I am afraid that I could just not get into this literary horror by Mariana Enriquez.

Unfortunately, this was one of those books that I liked the sound of more that the book itself.

Mariana Enriquez definitely has power in her writing, of that there is no doubt, but I just had a hard time connecting with this book at all. The story revolves one of the most brutal times in Argentinian history, and tries to deal with the fallout of those particular events by making the ruling regime of an evil organisation. One that is involved with demon worship etc, and tries to explore the evil that the regime did by extrapolating that feeling of there must be a reason why these things happened and that the reason for the events that were occurring were due to an unimaginable evil, which is a pretty good framing device.

However, it just failed to draw me in. Throughout the big page count of the book, for me, the pacing was too erratic. Initially with the first section of the book, the story galloped along, but then I found that it slowed down considerably and felt that it meandered along for a large part of the book.

Now I know that others will find this book compelling and utterly brilliant, but me? I cannot say that I did. Hey! Not every book is for everyone right?

I really enjoyed the Dangers of Smoking in Bed and I was delighted to receive a copy of Our Share of Night.
Mariana's writing is stunning - it's wonderfully eerie, and I have always enjoyed magical realism. It was a bit slow, but the themes of paternal love and protection and desperation, weaved together with the politics of the state really made it a gem to read. It's an absolute triumph of gothic fiction, and I can't wait for more!

Our Share of Night
By Mariana Enriquez

What have I just read? While I gather my thoughts let me throw out some adjectives: macabre, dark, twisted, demented. Some emotions: traumatised, haunted, confused. I recently read Things We Lost in the Fire by this author and I found her writing intriguing, shocking, brutal and strangely compelling.

Juan is a man in pain, born with a congenital heart defect, he is sold by his family to the doctor who is his best shot at a healthy life, but that doctor is a member of a demon worshipping cult, The Order and it is all they can do to keep Juan alive for their ceremonial practices. Once he realises that their eyes are firmly set on his son Gasper as his replacement, he must use the forces of dark and evil to protect his son from the living hell they intend for him.

This book begins with a clash of folk horror, demonology, veneration of saints and relics that we associate with many South American cultures. It is told in a sort of fever dream. I have to admit that had I not committed to reviewing this title, I would have DNFed it at this point. This is a very long book, 736 pages, was it worth continuing?

The pacing is odd. There are 6 chapters and no obvious breakpoints. It really drags and I feel that it escaped several rounds of editing. At times the narrative is choppy and perhaps this is a translation issue. I don't know who I would recommend this to with it's brutal, bloodthirsty, menace and it's themes of mutilation, child abuse, rape, exploitation, lack of respect for human life....and yet.....the narrative is aligned with the horrific political situation of Argentia during the dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s, and it's aftermath. For all it's demonic references, all it's cruelty, all it's macumba, it speaks of how much more terrifying humans can be to each other than monsters and undead. It truly reaches into your heart and demonstrates what it is like to live in a place and time where life is cheap.

Thanks to #netgalley for the eARC

I'm afraid this book wasn't for me. On paper it sounded right up my street but I couldn't connect with either the characters or the writing style and I found it didn't bring me any enjoyment when reading.

It's not the book's fault, it just wasn't for me. My star rating reflects my own opinion and is not a judgement on the quality of the book.

Review not posted anywhere else.

I have to admit that I struggled with The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, but not because of the writing, which I loved- I think I just struggled with the short story format. And so, I was excited to read a longer length novel by her, and, despite being 700+ pages, I found it a breeze and raced through it.

This novel covers many horror tropes- rituals, sacrifices, the dead, possession, and being pursued by a faceless organisation- but somehow never felt like a laundry list of those same tropes.

This book is unnerving, weird, and wonderfully angry, with a political bent that runs through it, which I think is what elevates this to an interesting and dynamic novel, and keeps it burning throughout.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Dirty War in Argentina, lasted from 1976-1983 and was a period when a coup overthrew a
democratically elected government, and the military mercilessly eliminated any possible opposition- mass slaughters, executions, and hundreds of thousands who were ‘disappeared’, their fate completely unknown to their families, to this day. This hasn’t been a period of history adequately explored in fiction and so I was very keen to read this book. Unfortunately, this is book is not going to fill that gap.
There is a case to be made for the use of horror to highlight realities that are so brutal they can only be explained by the supernatural and the fantastical-among the most obvious being the absolutely
excellent ‘Get out’ and ‘Us’, and Babenco’s spectacular and moving ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’.
However, that requires a skillful writer or it can end up trivialising very real human brutalities, which is what Enriquez ends up doing. The atrocities of the junta and the landed elite who supported them were not carried out under the influence of a nameless demon or malign supernatural force-they were done by very real humans in a quest for power. By assigning motivations to the supernatural, you’re not highlighting the grotesque-you’re reducing it to the juvenile. Eriquez wants to show the complete amorality of the wealthy in Argentina who were willing collaborators of the junta, and who were allowed to get away with unspeakable cruelties in return for their support. This Is a situation that still continues in several parts of the world, and is a conceit worth exploring. So far so good. However, devoting nearly half the book to over the top cult rituals and long-winded scenes of torture and rape rob the conceit of its power, and Enriquez ends up committing the same crime metaphorically as her villains, she exploits the pain of the powerless just to add in three hundred extra pages on them being tortured and brutalised. The synopsis of the book led me to believe that it tacked the horrors of the Dirty War through the medium of the horror novel and its familiar tropes-however the book reads more like a particularly badly written Goosebumps-for-adults , with several entire sections and characters that could have been edited out completely, since they add absolutely nothing to the story, and don’t even serve as effective scares. There's a long section where a character moves to London, specifically CHelsea when it was 'Swinging', that reads like a collection of 'Swinging London' tropes lifted straight from Shawn Levy. Her characters don’t even have particularly unique voices-chapters don’t mention
which character’s view you’re getting, and since the writing isn’t distinctive enough, I ended up
confusing one character for another, and realizing only halfway through the chapter who it was. Even a topic as important as the dangers journalists trying to report on the Dirty War, Enriques ends up making it in service of her cult, robbing the character of any agency and the writing of import. Enriquez resorts to tired tropes while writing her woman characters-they’re all described as “not like other women’, or absolute monsters, and the death of a woman that catalyses the story ends up falling by the wayside.
She also reveals the inherent pigmentocracy of South Americans, and it’s worse because I’m sure it’s not even intentional-there are multiple descriptions throughout the book about how attractive Juan and his son are because they’re “so blonde and tall” with Juan’s Swedish roots being emphasized over and over again, none of this being criticized at all. It’s quite laughable in a book from an author who takes pains to stress her liberal credentials. I would have been willing to overlook that in a better book, or even if it was only mentioned in passing, but nearly every character who encounters them makes it a point to comment on how attractive they are because they’re blonde.
For a period of 7 years, a military dictatorship, aided by the CIA and American technology, committed horrific crimes on it citizens with impunity. The fate of many of the victims still remains unknown to the families, and the amnesty declared on crimes committed during this period has denied them justice. These were carried out by regular people, like all of us, and the ones who aided them were also regular people. Not immortality-seeking devil-worshippers. That’s the horror of it. And that eludes Enriquez completely, though she probably lived through it. I feel very strongly about this because the world’s heading towards fascism and a narrative that’s more magical than realist is a disservice.

There were times when this book was completely gripping, but unfortunately, there were other times when I found it a slog to get through. I wanted more focus on the supernatural elements and when these were at the forefront of the narrative, I really enjoyed it. However, there were large portions of the book that focused on Gaspar's life, as a child, a young adult and then an adult and for me, these portions were a bit too meandering and indulgent. The writing throughout was beautiful and I liked the glimpses into Argentine history, but at over 700 pages, this was just too long for me.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book was quite a commitment to finish ,it is lengthy and at times I felt could have been edited down a bit perhaps a little too long
I usually read in one sitting but found that this book needed me to put it down and read something else for a bit .When I came back to the story I felt I was enjoying it more .
The story is gothic and horrific at times with quite significantly nightmareish scenes .I’m not a lover of horror genre and struggled a bit with some of these scenes ,babies stuck in cages with their legs broken the wrong way .The only way I managed to stick with these scenes was to decide they were imaginary as the reality was too awful to contemplate
The sections I enjoyed the most and which ended up saving the book for me were the naturalistic scenes .Argentina has real history that is hard enough to bare without the horror elements
The author has a distinctive writing style somewhat reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende ,the books setting on South America mostly Argentina gives the novel a strong sense of place .
I read an early version of the book on NetGalley Uk the book is published in the Uk on 13th October 2022

A slow burn horror with a lot of layers and different elements. The story took a little while to get into and to find the rhythm of the story but overall was an interesting read. I can see that this might be a divisive read for lots of people with some of the topics being explored.

I personally quite enjoyed it but felt that it could have been a bit shorter without having lost too much.

Absolutely perfect. I must say it took me a while to get into this book as it was my first foreign translation. Once I did however this book was right up my alley. It's difficult to describe and so I suggest that you go in blind and enjoy the ride. I know I did.