Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez is a haunting epic of grief, power, and inheritance

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night is not an easy read—and that’s what makes it unforgettable. This sprawling, terrifying, and deeply layered novel moves through decades of Argentina’s history, entangling grief, family, colonialism, and the occult in ways that feel both intimate and vast.

The novel begins with Juan and his six-year-old son Gaspar, reeling after the death of Rosario—Juan’s wife and Gaspar’s mother. They set out on a road trip to Rosario’s ancestral home, but this is no ordinary return to family. Rosario’s family belongs to The Order, a secretive cult that will stop at nothing in its pursuit of immortality. Their devotion is not to god or country, but to the Darkness, a supernatural force that demands unspeakable acts in exchange for power. Gaspar is their legacy, and Juan knows it.

At first, Enriquez immerses us in Juan’s perspective. He is tender with Gaspar, grief-stricken and desperate to shield his son from The Order. Yet this is not a simple father–son love story. Juan is both protector and abuser—loving and violent, fragile and monstrous. Just when you start to trust him, he lashes out in ways that leave both Gaspar and the reader reeling. Enriquez refuses to let us rest in easy moral binaries; instead, she forces us to confront the contradictions that make up a person.

Later, the narrative shifts to teenage Gaspar, whose perspective reframes much of what came before. His relationship with his father is as complicated as it gets—woven through with hate and love, resentment and longing. He knows his father lies to him, and those lies both save him from and bind him to his fate. As Juan’s body gives out, Gaspar is left to navigate the crushing weight of both grief and relief.

What makes Our Share of Night so masterful is how its seeming digressions reveal themselves to be essential. Enriquez lingers in Gaspar’s youth, sometimes meandering through memory and daily life, yet every detail circles back to the novel’s central obsessions: the cost of survival, the transmission of violence across generations, and the question of whether anyone can truly escape the destiny their family—and their country’s history—lays upon them.

The Order itself is chilling not only for its occult practices but also for what it represents. Its members are primarily white descendants of Europeans who came to Argentina in the 1700s, using supernatural power to accumulate wealth and crush anything in their way. This mirrors the real history of colonization: foreign invaders exploiting land and people, cloaking brutality in the guise of destiny. Enriquez dares to ask—was it merely greed and violence that allowed European empires to spread, or something even darker? In her vision, colonialism and the supernatural are bound together, both feeding on lives to sustain their own power.

Our Share of Night is horror on multiple levels: supernatural, political, and familial. Enriquez writes about grief with raw clarity, about love with complication, and about power with unflinching honesty. This is not horror for the sake of jump scares—it’s horror that lingers, that unsettles, that forces us to examine what we inherit and what we pass on.

Book club question: If you were Gaspar, would you see Juan as a savior or a destroyer—or is it possible he was always both? Let’s chat in the comments below!

Related Content

• First word on horror’s Mariana Enriquez interview (Cinema Crazed)
• “I see myself as a Latin American writer”: An interview with Mariana Enriquez (Latin American Literature Today)
• Haunting our ruins: Mariana Enríquez in conversation (Honi Soit)
• The dark themes of Mariana Enriquez (Electric Literature)

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