A masterpiece of genre mash-up ... A literary achievement, gorgeous and exacting in its execution ... Translation, to invoke Grossman’s famous metaphor, isn’t merely copying one language over another, like tracing paper, but rather an act of creation unto itself. Our Share of Night teases out the nuances of Enriquez’s spirited, in-your-face style, political epic masquerading as satanic farce.
An ambitious horror epic ... The concept of a rich and powerful demonic cult has been well trod in books and films, and yet the breadth of the world Enríquez creates through a perversity of detail is astounding ... Complicity is a recurring theme in the novel, and though there are characters who have a clearer sense of right and wrong, there are no heroes. Just about everyone is guilty, whether by abetting cruelty or ignoring it. Our Share of Night is ambitious because it is not only an immersive horror story but also an expansive family history that works to illustrate years of actual exploitation and repression in Argentina ... Unsettling and tragic, poignant and true, Our Share of Night is a masterwork from a writer with an unflinching gaze. If you can manage to hold that gaze with her, you will be richly rewarded.
...startlingly brilliant ... It expresses the horrors of Argentina’s disappeared, and the struggle to survive in the shadow of such a void ... Because Juan, Gaspar and Rosario are such magnetic characters, the narrative tends to slacken when Enriquez moves away from them. There are digressions that can feel gratuitous...And yet, even these moments build, becoming minor notes in an incantation. Our Share of Night is a mouthpiece for human darkness that, like Dalí’s cards, reveals the unspeakable. It is an enchanting, shattering, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.
Enríquez ditches the miniature and goes big. Shaping her style to the space, she allows it to go drastically slack ... It’s not just the bloat that dismays, it’s the aimlessness ... Our Share of Night takes this unstructured, direction-free wandering and makes of it a governing aesthetic. The plot is relatively straightforward ... The translator, Megan McDowell, has handled all Enríquez’s previous books, but this time something is off ... She seems to think that a commercial veneer obviates the need to invest language with life. The result is the worst of both worlds: neither thrills nor poetry, pace nor the pleasure of prose.
Sections jump about, rather confusingly, in time ... Enriquez’s premise is enticing — she mixes history and folklore, the personal and the political, to suggest the perversions of power, the ways people can be haunted, and how horror can hum underneath the everyday ... She allows her narrative to become bloated with rambling descriptions that blunt the story’s momentum. This is less slow burn, more slow crawl. It’s hard to empathise with her characters, who never really feel rounded out, and the sexual elements seem rather embarrassingly gratuitous. That Our Share of Night won Spain’s prestigious Premio Herralde in 2019 is surely down to its intent rather than its execution — but it nevertheless has the makings of a cult read.
There is a high gothic flavour to this material, as well as lurid, brilliantly over-the-top moments of grotesquery, of high violence – pulse points of savagery that are extreme enough for even the most jaded reader to look away in disgust. And yet it is the aftermath of these acts, the legacy of the brutality, which gives Our Share of Night its disquieting power ... The shifts in tone, perspective and time are expertly constructed, while the way each section picks up threads from the others is satisfying and deftly handled. Our Share of Night is a nightmare of novel, a howl at the past, and a warning to the future; one that is less horror fiction than a fiction of horrors. It has teeth, claws and a beating heart difficult to resist for those hardy of stomach.
The novel sprawls across time and place, both within and beyond Argentina’s borders, to provide a progressively clearer picture of the history and function of the occultist Order, as well as Juan and Gaspar’s outer circle of friends and family ... It reads like an elongated metaphor for Argentina’s infamous Dirty War, a critical takedown of global colonialism, and a treatise on the corruptive influence of power ... You’ll be educated and thrilled and (surprisingly) titillated reading Our Share of Night. Most of all, though, you’ll be left bereft. It’s not a fully pleasant experience. But it’s an immensely powerful one.
Mariana Enriquez’s grand, eloquent, and startling new novel... reveals how sometimes, only fiction can fully illuminate the monstrous, indescribable, and ultimately shattering aspects of our reality ... This novel operates as a kind of radio, constantly switching among stations. At moments the main narratives pipe through clearly, and at others we find ourselves attuned to staticky, liminal frequencies. This is a haunted story ... Many of the set pieces in this novel... will scan to certain readers as genre flourishes, genre having somehow become a catchall term that, among other functions, consigns unfamiliar ways of being and living to imaginary realms. Yet this novel—powered by urgent, image-drenched language rendered beautifully by the translator Megan McDowell—convincingly captures what it feels like when your life is suddenly interrupted by a series of events that are so unimaginable and devastating, they seem unreal. It turns out that a surreal event is best described in surreal terms.
Deeply unsettling yet riveting ... Tying together Argentinian folklore with occult canon, Enríquez creates a vivid world backdropped by political violence and the struggles of the powerful and the weak ... The empathy Enríquez feels towards her own characters despite their horrifying actions is deeply evident; through torture, execution and sacrifice, there’s is a binding thread of humanity that embraces every revolting action. Enríquez weaves tapestries through the blood-soaked histories of the characters, their pasts full of violence, trauma and inescapable monstrosity.
Enriquez’s fiction is set against forty years of Argentine history...Thankfully, there’s no suggestion that the Darkness is a clunky metaphor for the dictatorship: you can’t take ghoulish delight in a novel about a genuine and recent horror. Rather, the political events provide a background to the story: the 'vibration of evil in the street' makes it easier for the Order to operate ... Some readers may feel uncomfortable about this tangential connection, but Enriquez is careful not to be sensationalist, even when writing about the discovery of a mass grave ... She is also hugely – some might say overly – ambitious, having invented a supernatural family saga that can seem too ready to digress into side stories. Layers of background and explanation tie up our attention and slacken the pace. Juan seems to linger on the brink of death for hundreds of pages. For a true aficionado, a gothic novel can probably never go on too long. Anyone less devoted may find their attention drifting.
[A] literary horror tour de force ... Enriquez implicates us all, summoning such images as children in cages and bodies hanging from trees, visceral reminders and warnings.
A dark, twisted tale ... Even with such an unpredictable writing style, Enriquez perfectly paces solutions to the novel’s various mysteries, enticing readers through her chaotic dreamscape with answers that are as intriguing as they are frightening. Spooky and atmospheric, Our Share of Night is a constantly surprising and bloody ride.
A sprawling gothic novel holding a black mirror toward Argentina’s history of corruption and political violence and dosed with the conventions of horror fiction ... It’s awkward and exhausting by turns, often by design. Somehow the shock of such violence delivered upon children and the inevitable fatigue generated by unrelenting horror also mirror the author’s mistrust of reality as we know it ... A strange, arcane journey into South American horror with roots in the real evil that men do.
