Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Random House/Hogarth on February 7, 2023

Our Share of Night is a literary horror novel, a domestic drama with a supernatural twist. A father hopes that his son did not inherit his connection to the Darkness. When it becomes apparent that his son shares his ability to summon the Darkness, he wants to shield his son from his wife’s family, who expect the Darkness to reveal the secret of immortality. The son loves and hates his father. He will eventually need to confront his family, just as his father did.

The Order regards Juan Peterson as a medium, an essential bridge to the Darkness and its secrets. The Order has deep roots in England, but a branch of the family moved to Argentina, where it is ruled by the matriarch Mercedes. Juan and Rosario, the daughter of Mercedes, had a son named Gaspar. Rosario died three months before the novel begins, but Juan should still be able to speak with her. He cannot find her because she has been hidden from him. Who did the hiding?

Juan was born with a defective heart. He’s had multiple surgeries, but he knows his condition will lead to a premature death. Before he dies, Juan is desperate to find a way to keep the Order from taking control of Gaspar. The Order wants to compel Juan to allow his essence to enter Gaspar at the moment of death. The transmigration of consciousness is the secret of immortality that the Order craves. Juan wants his son to live his own life, not as a continuation of Juan and not a life of servitude to the Order.

Juan is convinced that Rosario was murdered because she wanted to protect Gaspar from the clutches of her family. When the story opens, Gaspar is only six. The Order does not know whether Gaspar has inherited the ability to become a medium. Juan learns the distressing truth when Gaspar begins to see dead people. Juan keeps that knowledge a secret from family members as he teaches Gaspar to make the dead go away.

The story spans generations as it traces the history of the Order. Mercedes is the “priestess of a god who ignores her.” She is always looking for new mediums but Juan is the best she has found. Mariana Enríquez details the rituals the Order follows to satisfy the hunger of the Darkness. Initiates willingly, even ecstatically, lose limbs when they touch the Darkness after it is summoned by a medium. It’s rare for horror novels to make the supernatural seem real rather than silly, but Enríquez has created a shadow world that seems just as real and even more frightening than the world we inhabit.

The novel’s first half focuses on Juan and his relationships with other family members who belong to the Order, including Rosario’s half-sister, with whom Juan has a complicated and intimate history. Much about Juan is complicated, from his bisexual relationships with family members to his parenting of Gaspar. Is Juan an abusive father or is he doing what must be done to protect his son?

Gaspar comes into his own when he enters an abandoned house with his friends. One of those friends is Adela, a distant relative who lost her arm to the Darkness. The door to the house is locked but Gaspar has the ability to enter locked doors. They discover that the house is larger on the inside than its outside dimensions. Adela enters a room in the house and closes the door behind her, challenging Gaspar with the only door he cannot open. Adela is never seen again (at least not in the corporeal world). Her disappearance will trouble Gaspar in the years to come. Gaspar will also be troubled by memories, or the absence of memories that would explain gaps in his life. Those memories will eventually return and illuminate Gaspar’s history with his father, but only after his father’s death.

Like many good horror novels, the story contrasts supernatural terror with the horror that is part of life in the seen world. Chapters in the second half follow several characters, often embodying a different aspect of life in Argentina at different times in the nation’s turbulent history. Pablo is one of Gaspar’s friends who entered the house with Adela. Pablo is secretly in love with Gaspar, but Gaspar is straight. As he grows older, Pablo struggles to balance his fear of AIDS — a disease that eventually claims most of his friends — with the thrill of anonymous sex. Pablo is shunned by moralistic Argentina. He still feels the hand that grasped his shoulder when he was lost in the house where Adela disappeared. Perhaps the supernatural forces that haunt him are symbolic of the other fears that torment gay men in Argentina.

Vicky was also in the house with Gaspar and Pablo. Ten years later, she’s a talented medical student, with an almost supernatural ability to diagnose hidden diseases. She wants Gaspar to believe that his occasional encounters with (the ghost of?) Adela are hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. The reader, like Gaspar, will doubt that medicine can explain the experiences that Gaspar, Pablo, and Vicky have. The novel asks whether disease and mental illness might be an outsider's explanation of perceptions they do not share or understand.

A late chapter follows a journalist who tries to investigate the story of Adela. She learns how difficult it is to find Gaspar, even when she knows exactly where he lives. Another chapter follows Gaspar as he is haunted by the ghosts of his father and Adela. Psychiatric care does no good in a country where disappearances are common and everyone feels haunted. Argentina’s military dictatorship is a version of the Darkness; its believers control the nation in the way that the Order controls Gaspar’s family.

The novel covers an impressive amount of ground without ever causing confusion. Enríquez’s crystalline prose build a supernatural world that no less sharply focused than the Argentina in which her carefully crafted characters live. Themes of family drama (a well-meaning father whose parenting is cruel because he knows no other way; a mother who shields her child from the child's controlling grandmother) will resonate with families that are troubled by violence and strife that has no supernatural origin. A strong ending resolves Gaspar’s immediate problem while recognizing that the pain of lost souls and the risk of new horrors are always a part of life. Our Share of Night sets a new bar for literary horror novels.

RECOMMENDED

Storm Watch by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 28, 2023

Storm Watch could have been titled Red Meat. I mean, you’ve got the Chinese Communist Party. You’ve got climate change denialism and complaints about mask mandates. You’ve got “Silicon Valley activists and the Hollywood elite” who see Wyoming libertarians as a threat to their way of life. You’ve got “coastal elites” who want to “shut down our energy industry, our cattle ranches, our timber industry, and just about every part of our American way of life. They’ve never owned a gun, gone to church, or served in the military.” You’ve got “Washington D.C. elites” who eliminated the “legitimate livelihoods” of Keystone pipeline workers. You’ve got complaints about the “deep state,” electric cars, and “children being indoctrinated and corrupted in their schools by unscrupulous teachers and administrators who preached gender fluidity and taught critical race theory.” You’ve got hysterical claims that “they’re coming for our guns.” You’ve got the FBI at the vanguard of a war against conservatives. You’ve got the phrases “domestic terrorists” and “insurrection” appearing in quotation marks to signal a disbelief that the phrases represent reality.

To be fair, the protagonist of this series, Joe Pickett, does not personally embrace any of this nonsense. Neither does Joe denounce it. Joe is studiously free from opinions. At least, he feels no need to express any opinions that don’t relate to his job as a game warden, western apparel, his mother-in-law, or his daughters’ boyfriends. Nate Romanowski, the supporting character whose role is to represent paranoid members of the far right, nods approvingly at many of the rants, giving far right readership a reason to keep coming back to the series. Nate is one of theirs.

Nate complains that the Secretary of the Interior makes decisions that benefit the entire nation, not just Wyoming. He also complains that public lands exist mostly in the West. Yeah, but that’s not a red/blue issue. The state with the most federally owned land is a blue state (Nevada), and the percentage of federal ownership in California is about the same as it is in Wyoming. Federal land ownership isn’t some conspiracy that targets red states, but fact-checking is noticeably absent in Storm Watch.

Joe and Nate both recognize that many of the people who embrace these views are losers and meth addicts. One of their apologists argues that they are “men whose dignity has been taken from them” because they lost their pipeline jobs. Mind you, the Keystone pipeline might have created three dozen permanent jobs across the entire nation. Some welders and pipefitters lost the opportunity for temporary employment on a specific project, but they didn’t lose actual jobs because the permits that were granted and quickly revoked never took effect. If you lose your dignity because you didn’t get a job that never existed, it seems to me you’re looking for an excuse to explain your meth addiction.

So put the red meat aside and what have you got? Joe is tracking an elk that was injured in a car accident. He finds a building with noisy air conditioning in the middle of winter, which strikes him as odd. Then he finds a dead body hanging out of a window in the building. The dead guy is a professor at Wyoming’s only university. Joe later learns that the professor is suspected of being a Chinese spy (because he’s Chinese) despite the utter absence of anything worth spying on in Wyoming, much less at a public university where academic projects aren’t national secrets. The building that puzzles Joe houses computers that are engaged in cryptocurrency mining. Joe also chases snowmobilers who are harassing elk in the hope that their antlers will fall off in advance of the season when it is legal to collect fallen antlers. The snowmobilers have something to do with the dead professor. All of this relates to dual threats to the current Republican governor’s upcoming reelection campaign: one by a fringe group of far right snowmobiling meth addicts and the second by the former Democratic governor, who has a distaste for the current governor’s coziness with the Chinese Communist Party.

The key villain, a paranoid nutcase named Jason Demo, believes that real Americans own guns, go to church, drive a pickup, and shop at Walmart. He’s confident that elites (meaning people who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc.) have declared war on the West, the West being where real Americans live, except for the ones on the West Coast and those who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc. Demo rants about high unemployment (apparently he doesn’t read the news) and complains that there isn’t enough mining and oil drilling on federal land (again, a belief not driven by actual facts). He believes that environmental concerns keep us from being energy independent, a point of view that’s pretty funny, given the number of times this series has lectured about the evils of wind energy. Demo is ready to make a stand via insurgency, apparently failing to notice how well the last insurgency went. That happens when you don’t read the news.

This isn’t a bad story if you don't take the red meat seriously, including the notion that “rogue” FBI agents created an extremist group so they could arrest domestic terrorists of their own invention. Yeah, whatever. And if you ignore the governor’s collusion with the Chinese. He might have had something to do with the spy balloon over Montana, although the book was written before the balloon was detected. The story moves quickly and I thought it was entertaining, perhaps because it is so farcical.

As usual, Joe doesn’t do much of anything, apart from getting stuck in the snow and fretting that a boy (even a churchgoing boy who wears the correct western gear) might get into his daughter’s jeans. There’s not much chance of that happening. Nate and his friend Geronimo take care of the necessary killing so that Joe can keep his hands clean. The novel proves again that the person with the biggest gun wins (Nate is proud of having one of the world’s biggest handguns, while Geronimo has a shotgun with not one, not two, but three barrels).

In its early days, before C.J. Box made such an obvious attempt to appeal to a far right readership by giving a voice to their silly grievances, the Joe Pickett series was much better. While Box has never been much of a prose stylist, he does capture the beauty that Wyoming residents find its their desolate environment. Box’s best work is the apolitical Blue Heaven, a novel that proves Box can mine the setting of unpopulated western states for good atmosphere and craft sound plots if he stays away from politics. 

The Pickett novels have always characterized environmentalists as extremists, so I am heartened by the half-hearted effort to recognize that people on the far right take extreme and dangerous action, even if they must be goaded to do so by rogue FBI agents. Box is careful not to make Pickett the voice of extremism, which is this novel’s saving grace. Still, I get the sense that Box is trying to straddle a line by appealing to an audience with politically extreme views without expressly endorsing them.

There is barely enough good storytelling in Storm Watch to overcome the neutral presentation of far right talking points, but the novel advances too many unchallenged lies for me to recommend it without reservations. I suppose this would be a good book for fact-challenged readers who might enjoy chewing a healthy serving of red meat, but it’s also a good read for rational readers who enjoy laughing at far right fantasies.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Device Free Weekend by Sean Doolittle

Published by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on February 28, 2023

We spend too much time looking down at our phones. That, at least, is the argument made by a central character in Device Free Weekend, as well as an army of sociologists, psychologists, and talking heads. The character who makes that argument, Ryan, occupies a position similar to Mark Zuckerberg’s. The Zuckerberg clone is filled with regret that his social media site has contributed to various social problems, including divisiveness and alienation. The site connects people, but too many people connect to fuel their rage, fill their addled minds with lies, and organize or join hate groups. The site also makes it possible for Russia to influence elections and reduces the amount of time children spend with their parents. These are not original observations about the downside of social media, but they drive the plot in this not-quite-credible thriller.

Seven young people were friends in college. Ryan went on to develop a social media empire in Seattle called Link. Lanie and Beau got married and had kids. They used Link to become real estate influencers. Will and Perry also ended up as a couple. Emma was Ryan’s friend when they were children living in the same Minneapolis neighborhood. Stephen was Ryan’s best college friend until they had a falling out over Emma. But that was long ago, Emma and Stephen are divorced, and the hatchets were eventually buried. Or not.

Ryan invites his six college friends to join him for a device-free weekend on his private island off the coast of Washington. With all the elements of a college reunion relationship drama in place, Device Free Weekend adds a twist. Ryan is dying and he plans to take Link with him. Since he is not quite mentally stable, he wants to burden his friends by making them part of his personal drama. Mental illness is, I think, the only plausible explanation for the plot device that sets the story in motion.

We learned from The Big Chill that a reunion of friends can be a dramatic event, but Ryan isn’t satisfied with bringing friends together to rehash their emotional baggage. Ryan intends to lock them inside his island home and confront them with a version of the Trolley Problem. He has kidnapped the Link board members and tied them up on his yacht. He gives his friends a choice that they must make unanimously. They can push a red icon on a tablet and blow up the yacht, killing Ryan and the Board. Or they can push a green icon and approve Ryan’s plan to blow up the buildings that house Link and the company’s servers, causing massive economic damage but (since this will happen on a holiday) perhaps without inflicting death. If they do nothing, Ryan will blow up Link anyway, so he promises to make them multimillionaires if they press the green icon.

Ryan knows his friends won’t kill a boatload of strangers, even if they might want to kill him for trapping them all in his house. The real question is whether they will make themselves complicit in destroying Link, an event that will happen anyway. Ryan’s desperate need for his friends’ approval seems at odds with the certainty that, even if they press the green icon, they will never again approve of Ryan. Maybe he doesn’t care because he’s dying anyway. Maybe he’s such a narcissist that sucking his friends into his scheme is all that matters. Regardless of the exact nature of Ryan’s mental status, it is difficult to understand his motivation for testing the ethics of his innocent friends.

Naturally, the plan does not unfold as Ryan envisioned it. Events appropriate to a thriller ensue as his friends try to thwart his scheme. Will and Perry are inadvertently locked out of Ryan’s home when they should be locked in, setting up a chase across the island by Jud and Kai, two of Ryan’s underlings who are helping him with his insane scheme. The plan is further disrupted when Jud and Kai depart from the script. Meanwhile, the imprisoned friends quarrel about ethics while they try to escape from the house. Moderately entertaining action scenes involve explosions, chases (including a chase up a ladder affixed to a tower), and crashing a stolen TV news truck into a building. Sadly, none of this seems sufficiently real to be gripping.

As I’ve noted, the premise is hard to swallow, even if one accepts that a wealthy CEO might be so caught up in his own ego that he engages in unhinged behavior. Perhaps successful CEOs can become wildly irrational while maintaining control of their business empires; Musk’s erratic takeover of Twitter might be a less violent example. Perhaps people behave differently when they are on the verge of death and freed from considertation of consequences. Still, a deeper exploration of Ryan’s psyche might have resulted in a more convincing story.

Characters in general are a bit shallow. The Ryan-Stephen-Emma triangle takes a silly turn at the end, powered by Ryan’s megalomaniacal quest to control reality. The moment seems forced.

For a book that says “thriller” on the cover, Device Free Weekend is light on thrills. Still, the ending is not easy to predict and the story generates some fun moments. Ten years ago, I might have regarded Ryan’s lectures about social media as prescient and given the novel high marks for that reason. At this point, I have reservations about encouraging readers to spend time with a book that takes on obvious targets and doesn’t deliver the kind of engaging story that I want from a thriller.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Slava: After the Fall by Pierre-Henry Gomont

First published in France in 2022; published in translation by Europe Comics on January 25, 2023

This graphic novel is set in the 1990s. Russia has transitioned from a country of corrupt government officials controlling the means of production to one of corrupt oligarchs controlling a privatized economy. Slava Segalov “grew up in a world where ‘salesman’ meant ‘scammer’.” He aspired to be a starving artist but, after he tired of starving, joined his childhood friend, Dimitri Lavrin, in the business of  looting abandoned Soviet buildings. Dimitri steals goods to sell to Russian consumers who are eager to own the things they always coveted. While Slava was once a student of philosophy and art, Dimitri — a lifelong grifter — is teaching Slava to be a capitalist (i.e., thief).

Slava and Dimitri are driving a van full of looted goods when a band of highway robbers forces the van off the road. An armed woman named Nina rescues them for the bargain price of 500 rubles. She takes them to an abandoned resort that Dimitri regards as ripe for looting. Nina is squatting there with her father (Volodya) and doesn’t appreciate the concept of being looted in exchange for saving Dimitri’s life. Volodya, on the other hand, wants to make a deal with Dimitri even if he’s a grifter because “We’re Russians. Racketeering’s in our blood. Before, during, and after communism. It courses through our veins as surely as vodka.”

Nina is squatting in the resort because the mine that employed her is being privatized. Dimitri understands (and admires) the investor’s scheme to acquire the mine dirt cheap in exchange for lavish promises of high-paying jobs, followed by closing the mine and selling its assets for a tidy profit. The miners are less sanguine when Dimitri explains the investor’s scheme, but Nina’s boyfriend proposes a grift of his own to benefit the miners.

The story takes the four central characters on an eventful journey through the mountains and villages of a corrupt land. Slava begins to question Dimitri’s cynical nature. Dimitri believes Slava has only acquired morality because he is enchanted by Nina. As a prototypical Russian, Volodya solves problems by drinking and fighting. Nina is attracted to Slava but doesn’t want to betray her boyfriend.

The story is amusing but dark, rooted in the pain of ordinary people who have little hope of improving their lives because they are part of a system that does not value ordinary people. The story creates satisfying tension as the characters clash and unite in pursuit of separate and common agendas. While the ending is satisfying, it doesn’t avoid the harsh reality of life in an empire ruled by crime.

Pierre-Henry Gomont’s art is somewhere between cartoonish and stylized realism. Think Doonesbury with a bit more detail. The story is narrated in the margins between rows of panels. Dialog and thought balloons sometimes rely on a picture — a raging fire or a man swinging from a noose — rather than words. I’m no art critic, but I thought the art made a significant contribution to the story, as should be the case in a graphic novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo

Published by Atria Books on February 14, 2023

In this alternate history, Argentina won a war with the US by weaponizing pigments.  Major cities were lost in the psychopigment blitzkrieg. Veterans are still depressed after being exposed to Deepest Blue. San Francisco suffers from the residue of a Magenta Obsession bomb (warning signs caution visitors that “your emotions might not be your own”). Cities like Boise and Iowa City are the new centers of urban importance in what is left of the United States.

Pigments can be inhaled, swallowed in gel caps, or absorbed through the skin. Some pigments have become popular recreational substances. Each pigment produces a different mental state: Cerulean Guilt, Apricot Awe, Scarlet Passion. Slate Gray produces ennui. Sunshine Yellow is prescribed as an antidepressant.

A clumsy attempt to explain psychopigments depends on psychobabble — an “invisible fog of feelings that humans emit with every sentiment” is distilled and synthesized before being unleashed in “an overwhelming concentration of that same miasma” that becomes “contagious, pushing the feelings of one village member into another, gaining strength from every carrier.” Okay, but what?

Within that postapocalyptic setting, The Shamshine Blind attempts to develop a police detective thriller. It is essentially an “exotic drug dealer” novel, the kind where cops work to stop new designer drugs before they create havoc, except that drugs have been rebranded as pigments. The concept has imaginative appeal but it doesn’t quite work.

Kay Curtida works for Pigment Enforcement, a law enforcement agency that tries to keep new pigments off the market while assuring that known pigments are not abused. Paz Pardo is so busy building her world of psychopigments that it takes some time before she gives Curtida anything to do. Curtida is supposedly working on a counterfeit Sunshine pigment that her agency calls Shamshine, but other detectives have that investigation under control. While Curtida waits to take on the challenge of a new pigment, she entertains herself with relationship drama, fretting about her mother (who wants her to get married) and the return of Doug Nambi to her life, with whom she had a thing when they were both cadets.

Curtida takes an interest in Winfred Pimsley, who is “a crook but my kind of crook.” When the plot eventually gets rolling, Curtida discovers what seems to be a new pigment in the pigment collection that Pimsley keeps in his antique store. Perhaps it was synthesized by Priscilla Kim, a notorious pigment bootlegger, but what might it be? Ananda Ashaji, leader of a cult called the Pinkos, has been ranting about Hope Depletion Events. Could the new pigment give people hope? Doesn’t sound like such a bad thing in a world where hope is a vanishing commodity. Perhaps it is something more nefarious than hope, a pigment that emulates the opiate of the masses.

A mundane plot is overshadowed by the underdeveloped background of Argentine rule (complete with hyper-inflation) over the US. The story imagines a faith-based paramilitary terrorist organization called Knights of Liberty that may be competing or cooperating with the Pinkos. I’m not sure whether other readers would be as confused by the story as I was. Perhaps I lost interest too early to make a serious effort to arrange the plot elements in my memory.

An unreasonable amount of relationship drama does nothing to make the story more interesting. Did Curtida want to forget that she had sex with Plato because he was a high school lothario who had sex with all the girls? Why is Curtida worried about what her mother will think about her fake marriage to Meekins? My answer to questions surrounding the novel’s relationship drama questions was: Who cares?

To her credit, Pardo works diligently to avoid making an inherently messy plot entirely incomprehensible. I’m sure a reader with a notepad and more focused attention might make sense of it. I didn’t find a reason to bother. While the story shows imagination and promise, neither the regrettably noirish plot nor the excessively fretful characters spoke to me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS