Mariana Enriquez / ‘Our Share of Night’ is a masterpiece of supernatural horror

Mariana Enriquez

 

‘Our Share of Night’ is a masterpiece of supernatural horror

Mariana Enriquez’s novel, her first published in English, uses otherworldly elements to consider Argentina’s violent history

Review by Hamilton Cain

February 5, 2023

As political partisanship boiled over in the aughts, showrunner Alan Ball rolled out HBO’s “True Blood,” adapting Charlaine Harris’s pulp series about a coven of vampires — and the humans who love them — for the small screen, tapping horror tropes to plumb deeper truths surrounding xenophobia and desire. Excessive gore, spiritual angst, sexy bodies: They were all there for the audience, no holds barred. Moody yet hilarious, the show won an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

I frequently thought of “True Blood” as I read Mariana Enriquez’s masterpiece of genre mash-up, “Our Share of Night,” the Argentine writer’s first novel published in English. Lauded for her short fiction, Enriquez here slathers on supernatural conceits: How better to respond to that country’s violent history than with a shadowy sect teeming with wraiths and demons, a haunted house, a dynastic family that would sacrifice its own to maintain power? Make no mistake, though: “Our Share of Night” is a literary achievement, gorgeous and exacting in its execution.