Already know this is one of my favorites of 2024. So much to think about and dig through here, I'm in love. ( )

Elaborate, heavy, involved, deep. Yeah, those are definitely good descriptions. It’s such an amazing experience to immerse yourself in another culture during a literary adventure. Most books I’ve read are an adventure with their basic elemental parts, this book was a bit more like a cerebral cake I tried desperately to enjoy over a longer period of time.

This novel feels like a story about something so sinister and ancient, and we get to see a few snapshots over such a small time frame, as it journeys through one family and their constituents. There may have been some short periods of unnecessary tangents, but overall every section gave color and body to the blooms, roses and falls of the characters as to really get to know them. This story had every feel imaginable and were done well. The novel may have been a chunk, but I still wish there were at least 50ish or so more pages to conclude the heartfelt notion at the very end of the story. Because of those 2 small personal itches, 4.5 stars from me.
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https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2024/01/2024003-our-share-of-night-mariana.html ( )

This is as hard to get back to as it is to give up. Evil is bad for children and other living things. I'm not sure why I found it as readable as I did, but it was possibly because the gross happenings in the narrative are dwarfed by those recalled - except in one final incident, and we view the destruction from the point of view of those struggling against it. It is the characters and the care they occasionally have for each other as they struggle with themselves and their doomed entanglement.
Just about every trigger warning (well not tentacles) would be appropriate for this book although very little of the truly unspeakable is in-your-face. ( )

And now for an Argentinian horror novel, by the author of the supremely excellent short story collection, Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez. This hefty novel begins as a horror story, and often returns to that genre, leaning heavily on gore. But there's a lot of book here, so this is also a family saga, the story of four childhood friends and a coming-of-age story.

A cabal of super wealthy people worship an entity they think of as Darkness, an entity that they believe can bring them a sort of immortality. In order to reach this entity, they need a conduit, but mediums are hard to find and, once found, quick to die, as each manifestation takes a physical toll and this group of worshippers insist on frequent ceremonies. A boy is found in Argentina and raised to be the medium by one of the families in the cabal. But despite marrying into the family, he isn't as docile as they would like. When he has a son, he takes steps to protect the boy, despite being desperately ill himself, steps that will protect the boy for a certain period of time.

The ceremonies are graphically described and there's a fair amount of child torture, although this takes place mostly off the page. It's intense in places, but also prone to long digressions and side plots. If you like your horror to involve ancient evil powers and contain a quantity of mutilations and dead bodies, while also enjoying a story that takes its time and wanders off on tangents about politics, social movements, history and the lives of secondary characters, you'll like this one. Enriquez has a wild and dark imagination and Megan McDowell's translation is, as usual, extremely smooth and readable. I'll also note that there are ample descriptions of child abuse in this book. ( )