Welcome to my hoard. Watch your step and don’t touch anything.
Here in my decrepit subterranean den, we’ll be going through the books I’m reading every week. Some will be good, some will be bad, some will be downright mediocre and a chosen few will be damned to the deepest bowels of hell. Oh, and don’t mind the rats.
For this first installment, we’ll start on a high note with a recent read that has found its righteous place in the hallowed sanctuary of books I will never get over.
This book shows how violence needs to perpetuate itself by justifying atrocity through a thousand pretenses of justice, progress, family and religion. In truth, the only goal of this violence is to create more violence. Within everyone is a hidden urge toward cruelty and a morbid fascination with death that serves no purpose but to feed our innate sadism.
Mariana Enriquez largely sets her 2019 esoteric gothic horror book, “Our Share of Night,” in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Enriquez discusses colonization, slavery and the brutal dictatorship that disappeared 30,000 people throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The novel is deeply steeped in Argentine history.
Originally published in Spanish, Megan McDowell gave life to its excellent English translation in 2023.
The story follows a wealthy, private family in Argentina who worship a deadly, ravenous god called “the Darkness.” It opens in 1981 with Juan Peterson, a “medium” who can use strange magic and summon the Darkness at an incredible cost to his health.
Shortly after the death of his wife, Rosario Bradford, Juan travels with his son, Gaspar, to the mysterious Bradfords’ house. Gaspar has inherited Juan’s power, and with it, the constant threat to his life.
With a terminal heart condition slowly killing Juan, only made worse by the Bradfords’ sadistic manipulation of his summoning, he will do anything to protect Gaspar from their family.
Enriquez’s sickeningly descriptive horror writing evokes the most detailed cinematic bloodbaths. With graphic medical horror and depictions of asphyxiation that suffocate the reader just as much as the character, every moment in this 736-page novel is saturated by the grotesque.
Sometimes Juan is a sympathetic, damaged man, and often he’s a monstrous abuser. His nitroglycerin-unstable moods create a constant sense of domestic dread about when and how he’ll blow up next. In trying to protect Gaspar from the Darkness, he can’t help but emulate its violence.
It tackles familial abuse head-on, forcing the reader to experience the same disorientation and fear that Gaspar does.
Enriquez questions our morbid fascination with horror itself, criticizing how true crime, war, xenophobia, zealotry and trauma indoctrinate everyone into the cult of violence.
“Our Share of Night” isn’t an easy beast to tame. It takes place over several decades, slowly unraveling its complex story layered with unreliable narrators and intersecting timelines.
The cryptic magic system combines Argentine folklore, Western esotericism and cosmic horror. Enriquez’s novel overflows with nuanced characters, subtext, mystery and a thrillingly satisfying resolution that brings it all together.
In truth, summarizing everything contained within this massive, ambitious, absolutely singular story is an impossible endeavor. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve ever read, and one which requires careful attention to appreciate in all its ornate detail.
Throughout Mariana Enriquez’s grand meditation on fear, we come to understand that the darkness that draws us into the world of “Our Share of Night” is the same darkness that possesses us to consume one another again and again, never to be satiated.
This book certainly belongs on its perch atop my most ancient basalt pedestal. In blatant disregard for its themes, I will be bequeathing offerings of blood and wine on the daily as I chant my profane prayers to the Darkness.
Alright, run along now. I have a ceremonial to attend to.
