Mariana Enriquez is mostly known for her short narrative. We included her in a little list to keep spreading the Halloween cheer last year. Our Share of Night, for its part, is a big, chunky girl. It is also Enriquez’s most ambitious novel to date that keeps her style intact and introduces more horrors and complex familial relationships.
The novel is divided into six parts, all with different narrators. The main narrative revolves around a cult called the Order and the deity they worship, the Darkness. The cult is unable to commune directly with the Darkness—they need a medium. Enter Juan, the medium; Rosario, the direct descendant of one of the cult’s founders; and Gaspar, their son. The Darkness, the cult, its rituals, and the toll they take on the medium are always on the background of the story and drive most of the plot. But power dynamics, violence, greed, legacy, and deep bonds are really the core of the story.
Juan is a poor and sickly boy bought off from his family by a member of the cult after Juan’s abilities manifest during a heart surgery. Juan is integrated—but never adopted—into one of the two founding families just because he is the link with the Darkness. The only power he holds is that of embodying the deity during communion. The Darkness speaks and acts through Juan. However, Juan is quite dispossessed and under the cult’s thumb in every other aspect of his life.
The book is set during Argentina’s dictatorship, adding another layer of power dynamics and fear. The cult is free to do their will during the dictatorship, as money and military power often go well together. The founding families dabble in kidnapping, torturing, and murdering in the name of the Darkness. Their deeds always go unpunished, and the book is very emphatic in pointing that out. All the cult’s victims go completely unnoticed amid the dictatorship’s forced disappearances.
Even though this is a horror novel, it is not outright scary. The narrative is very atmospheric, slowly building up dread to the point of painful tension. Supernatural occurrences are not uncommon and are seamlessly integrated into the narrative world. The descriptions evoque very specific and surrounding images. There’s a particular passage when Juan starts the ritual for the first time that had me gripping the book and actually gasping. I think about it at least once a day—it’s that good.
Another main topic is legacy. Juan tries to do everything in his power to stop Gaspar from developing abilities and from falling victim to the cult. However, in order to do so, Juan has to distance himself from his son and hide things from him, constantly lying to him and making Gaspar think he’s hallucinating things. Gaspar has to live not knowing exactly who he is, why he sees what he sees, and enduring his father’s physical and psychological abuse.
Gaspar knows he has to break this never-ending cycle of violence and self-loathing, but he also has no idea how to do that. He’s a stranger to himself and is constantly seeking out a truth that was always hidden from him. In that sense, the book is both a chronicle of Juan, Rosario, and Gaspar’s lives and a coming-of-age story for Gaspar. It’s hard not to root for the guy.
Overall, the book has great creepy passages that are familiar—haunted houses is a recurring motif—as well as fresh concepts. The world building is fantastic and blends occultism with the historial reality of the time. Also, the narrative itself is so varied: There are first-person narrators, an omnipresent narrator, and even non-fiction writing emulating an article.
To put it simply: This novel is epic and a wild ride. Enjoyable, political, and personal. If you want to know what the deal with Mariana Enriquez is, pick up this book. It will surely be Quite An Experience.
Adriana Acevedo is an editor, writer, and sleep paralysis demon. She's been published in magazines like samfiftyfour and Impostor. She's bilingual and living in the monstrous Mexico City. Whenever she's not reading horror stories or watching horror movies, she's baking sourdough bread. Read more of her writing here.