What the darkness takes

Mariana Enriquez's Our Share of Night

Today I want to talk about Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez, but before I do that I want to remind you that today is the last day to get free shipping on a signed copy of any of my books.

First, thank you to everyone who ordered books. They will be going out this week, i.e. today. Especially to my brother-in-law (Hi Cory!) who ordered signed copies of Make It Stop for nine of his co-workers. For more details about the books and how much they cost, go here. Or, simply reply to this email and tell me what you want and we’ll make it happen. And if you’re reading this email on Thursday or Friday or Saturday morning (as a treat) I can still hook you up.

When I started this endeavor, you were probably like. “Whatever, Jim, it’s not even Thanksgiving, I have plenty of time for Xmas shopping. Well, how’s that working out for you?

That’s what I thought. It’s time for action.

Last night I finished Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez and translated by Megan McDowell. Some books I remember because of the story and with others it’s the writing that makes them memorable. Then there are the books that linger in my memory because the experience of reading them was so profound.

I’ll never forget reading Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on a ferry to the Aran Islands the night after I saw the play performed in Irish in Galway in the summer of 1992. The story, the words, the book cover, the movement of the boat, the lashing of the spray, the smell of diesel fuel, it’s all fixed in my mind.

I’ll always remember the two weeks I spent reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in the basement of the house where I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. I had just graduated from college and made up my mind to move to California and I was essentially waiting for my life to start. Reading Kerouac’s On the Road while I was in the Navy as our ship steamed from San Diego to San Francisco is equally memorable—talk about perfect timing.

More recently, reading Savage Detectives in Mexico City this summer was a total game changer. The book finally made sense to me and inspired the novel I’m working on now, the novel I took a break from to read Our Share of Night over the Thanksgiving holiday in Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, and San Diego.

Does a book that linger in your memory that’s inseparable from the experience of reading it? Share in the comments, please.

I’m pretty sure I found out about Mariana Enriquez through Paul Tremblay, a great writer in his own right (Hi, Paul!), and he had extremely high praise for Our Share of Night. How high? “One of the best novels of the 21st century.” So, pretty high.

When I did an event at Changing Hands in Tempe, Arizona with Kid Congo Powers, earlier this year, the host invited me to pick out a book as a thank you gift. Our Share of Night called out to me. I’d been traveling all over California, Arizona, and Nevada for weeks, trying to keep my pack light, so to speak. Now I was at the end of the tour and heading home and wasn’t daunted by the book’s size and heft—Our Share of Night is nearly 600 pages long and it’s a dense 600 pages. The words are packed tight on the page and the paragraphs are long. It’s not a quick read, nor is it an easy one.

The plot is best summed up like a demented soap opera: Once a wealthy family in Argentina gets a taste of supernatural power it will stop at nothing to acquire more, even if it means destroying itself. I generally don’t care for such broad, over-generalized descriptions of novels because they border on the meaningless, but here it’s helpful because the timeline of the novel overlaps what happened in Argentina in the late 70s and early 80s during the Dirty War when the dictatorship used the military to murder or disappear tens of thousands of leftist dissidents.

During this time citizens disappeared into detention centers where monstrous crimes and state-sanctioned atrocities were committed. Prisoners were tortured and killed. Pregnant mothers were separated from their babies who were then put up for adoption. The dead were dumped in mass graves. It was all done under a shroud of secrecy. Everyone knew what was happening but no one could talk about it openly for fear of being targeted and taken away. To this day no one knows how many people were disappeared by the government.

Enriquez has stated, and I’m paraphrasing, that the horror committed by the state was far worse than anything she could dream up. On the surface, I tend to agree. I’d much rather die like a character in a novel where my life has meaning and my death makes sense than to be picked up at a random checkpoint in the middle of the night and brought to a detention center where the people I hated in high school are my torturers and executioners and what’s left of my body is chucked into a clandestine pit in the middle of the jungle and everyone who ever knew me is left to wonder what happened to me on the road that night. Fuck that.

Who was spared this fate? Who was absolved from this terror? The rich and the powerful, of course. In Our Share of Night, the members of the super-secret Order of the Cult of the Shadow, whose members are spread all over the globe, are protected from political upheaval by their staggering wealth. The family is characterized in the novel as being like a nation within a nation.  

Our Share of Night is a possession novel but it’s not a story like The Exorcist or Come Closer that focuses on a single individual. Our Share of Night operates on a much broader scale. The Order has found a way to communicate with an ancient god with enormous power. The Order’s leadership believes that by offering sacrifices it can acquire forbidden knowledge from this demonic being they refer to as The Darkness.

However, there’s a catch. Only a handful of human beings with unique abilities can bridge the barrier between our world and this Other Place which this entity rules. The Order will go to extraordinary lengths to acquire these mediums and will do anything to get them to do their bidding. Enter Juan and his son Gaspar whose recently deceased mother, Rosario, was a member of the Order. Juan is a medium who wants to solve the mystery of what happened to his wife but he is determined to protect his son at all costs. He also has severe health issues that make every facet of existence precarious and his interactions with The Darkness threaten to kill him.

Juan, it occurs to me, is kind of an Elric figure. The thing that gives him power (The Darkness/Stormbringer) does great harm to others. He’s been separated from his wife (Rosario/Cymoril) and is sabotaged at every turn by those who want the power for themselves (The Order/Yyrkoon).

This theme of cannibalizing self-interest runs throughout the book in ways that I don’t want to explain at the risk of spoiling the book. The manner in which The Order pursues The Darkness and falls under its evil spell is a metaphor for the dictatorship’s rise to power and the lengths it goes to keep it. It’s not the evil itself that’s most destructive, but the reckless pursuit of it that causes those in power to lose their humanity.

I’m not trying to turn this into a thought experiment about what happened in Argentina (or Chile, or Mexico, or basically anywhere in the Americas) because the horror that Enriquez explores is exquisite. There are scenes that made my hair stand on end, scenes evoked with the terrifying precision of a nightmare, scenes where an arcane atrocity unfolded in the middle of a paragraph like gas burbling out of a swamp. There are a lot of “What the fuck did I just read” moments in Our Share of Night. When things get dark, they get very, very dark.

This gets me to what I love most about the novel and that’s the way it’s put together. I understand that Our Share of Night will never resonate for me the way it resonates for readers who grew up in Argentina (or Chile, or Mexico, etc.) during this period of unrest, readers who lived through the horror or grew up alongside the ghosts of a disappeared uncle or an aunt who went through things that are never talked about. But the structure of the novel helps readers like me get a little closer to that. The way Our Share of Night manufactures its own lore and then moves the reader back in time to witness its creation and then forward again to experience the aftermath is astonishing.

Reviewers overuse the word “epic” to describe multi-generations stories. All stories are multi-generational. We all came from somewhere, but not all stories are epic. This one truly is. It’s sneaky because it hooks the reader with a mystery: What happened to Juan’s wife? What will happen to him and his son? But by moving around in time and centering Gaspar for much of the novel, the question changes. “What happened?” is no longer as pressing as “How do we live with this?”

In the context of a supernatural story we take for granted that “powers” will be passed down from generation to the next. Enriquez wants to know what do we do with the trauma that has been passed down to us? But she doesn’t stop there. Enriquez takes it a step further and demands to know what do we do with this evil that lives inside us now?

Good fucking question.

I don’t live in Argentina. My parents aren’t from Chile. I don’t have children in Palestine or in Ukraine, but my heart is learning to live in these places just as it learned to navigate Belfast and Newtown. We are all haunted by places where things were taken away from us. Our Share of Night illustrates the pain of this loss is greater than a series of jump scares or spooky scenes. It goes so much deeper than that. Making it through the darkness with our humanity intact is the quintessential challenge of our time. We can’t side with monsters without risking becoming one.

Distant stars

About one hundred pages into Our Share of Night, I followed Marina Enriquez on Instagram and I learned we were both in Mexico. In fact, I’d just missed her in Mexico City. Weirdly, Bad Religion and OFF! have been crisscrossing South America as well and my feed is full of events in Mexico, which I just left, Chile, which I will soon visit, and Argentina, that I hope to visit someday.

Another coincidence: I’ve got a short story in the new edition of Starlite Pulp that was inspired by Mariana Enriquez’s short story “Dead Babies.” Enriquez’s story starts in almost stereotypical fashion and then takes a hard swerve into territory that’s frightening and strange. I wanted to try something similar.

At the time that I wrote the story I was preoccupied with the recent passing of my mother and the problem of what to do with her things and from there a premise emerged. It’s a story that straddles crime and horror, but is also deeply personal to me, making Starlite Pulp the perfect place for it. It’s called “Dead Gangsters.”

I’ll be reading with a group of writers featured in Starlite Pulp #3 at the release party at Space Cowboy books in Joshua Tree on Friday, December 30, 2023 at 4pm. After I get back from Chile, I’ll be drifting around the desert for a few days. Maybe I’ll see you there?

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my new novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the shitty news of the day.