Published 2023 (2019 in Spanish). Finished December 31st, 2025.
I believe that Enríquez's greatest strength as a horror author is not her grasp on the terrifying, but her grasp on the tragic. Though "Our Share of Night" has plenty of frightening moments, what compells me about it is how terribly sad the whole thing is.
The novel is about many things: cults, class disparity and exploitation, the Argentine dictatorship, terminal illness. But above all, the plot is about a father and a son. More specifically, it is about a father, Juan Peterson, trying feverishly to save his son from the horrors he had to endure, no matter the fact that his son doesn't understand, no matter the strain it places on their relationship. And it is about a son, Gaspar Peterson, growing up with a father he can't understand, who hurts him for seemingly no reason, whose death drives him inexorably toward the very thing he tried to save him from.
Thematically, the novel is about the failure to prevent the inevitable. Juan was always going to die of heart failure. Adela was always going to be eaten by that house. The club DJ was always going to die of AIDS. And no matter how hard Juan, with the help of Tati and Stephan, tried to prevent it, Gaspar was always going to return to his family. No amount of rituals, prayer, psychotherapy, or biomedicine could prevent any of, only delay it.
We can fight it all we want, but we are not the ultimate masters of our own lives. We are forever at the mercy of fate and chance and politics and the Darkness.
(Side note: I'm not quite sure what to make of the novel's relationship with injury, disease, and disability. The Darkness prefers ill mediums and makes them iller the more they interface. Adela, the disabled one of the children, is the one eaten by the house, but Adela was also disabled by the Darkness in the first place. (Same with Dr. Bradford. He is eaten whole years after he's nibbled on.) AIDS is present in subplots throughout the last chapter, but it bears no connection to the Darkness, at least that I can see. There's something going on here past the usual spes phthisica "illness grants one occult powers" thing, but I can't quite grasp it. Ah well.)