cover image Our Share of Night

Our Share of Night

Mariana Enriquez. Hogarth, $28.99 (608p) ISBN 978-0-451-49514-3

Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) twines sinister flights of occult imagination through the harsh realities of history in this decades-spanning masterpiece of literary horror. After Juan’s wife dies in 1981, a grieving Juan and his young son, Gaspar, embark on a road trip to her familial estate in Argentina, which Gaspar will inherit. The loss is made more fraught when Gaspar begins to manifest Juan’s ability to see and summon beings from the afterlife and beyond. Juan, a powerful but terminally ill medium, has long been in the grip of the Order, a cult controlled by his late wife’s family that strives for immortality while worshipping a mad and distant god. He knows that if Gaspar inherits his abilities, the cult will seize the boy to shape and use him for its own purposes. But if Gaspar hasn’t inherited, the Order plans to enact a ritual to keep Juan alive at the cost of Gaspar’s life. Juan launches a yearslong deception to save his son from the Order’s vampiric grasp, but the Order’s roots are far deeper than even Juan realizes—and its grip much harder to slither out of. Enriquez’s lush epic pulls no punches, probing the complex intimacies of familial bonds, the draw of darkness, and brutal Argentinian history. This unsettling gothic tale will leave readers shaken. Agent: María Lynch, Casanovas Lynch. (Feb.)