Our Share of Night

Set against decades of Argentine upheaval, the novel follows a family entangled with the Order, a centuries-old occult society that worships the Darkness, a ravenous supernatural entity that only a rare individual called a medium can summon. The Order's leaders believe the Darkness holds the secret to immortality. The story centers on Juan Peterson, the Order's most powerful medium, and his efforts to protect his son, Gaspar, from becoming the Order's next instrument.

Part I opens in January 1981. Juan, gravely ill with congenital heart disease, drives from Buenos Aires with six-year-old Gaspar toward the family estate of Puerto Reyes in the northeastern province of Misiones. Gaspar's mother, Rosario Reyes Bradford, from one of the Order's founding families, was killed three months earlier. Juan suspects the Order arranged her death because she demanded they stop using him and leave Gaspar alone. Every night, Juan performs a ritual to contact Rosario's spirit, but she remains unreachable.

During their journey, Gaspar perceives a ghost at their hotel, confirming Juan's fear that the boy has inherited his supernatural abilities. They visit Tali, Juan's half-sister-in-law and a healer who maintains a temple to San La Muerte, a folk saint venerated in northeastern Argentina. Juan reveals his plan: the Order, led by Florence Mathers and Mercedes Bradford, Juan's mother-in-law, intends Gaspar to serve either as a future medium or as a vessel for the Rite of Transfer, in which Juan's consciousness would be placed into Gaspar's body. Juan asks Tali and Stephen, Florence's eldest son and Juan's closest companion within the Order, to block Gaspar's emerging powers so the Order's tests show negative results.

At a cemetery, Juan summons a demon that tells him Rosario "belongs to those who speak to you" (80), meaning she is trapped in the Darkness. At Puerto Reyes, the annual Ceremonial takes place: Juan's hands transform into elongated black claws with golden nails, and the Darkness emerges from his body, devouring sacrifices while scribes transcribe its utterances. Afterward, Florence, Mercedes, and Anne Clarke, another Order leader, reveal they have trapped Rosario's spirit to ensure Juan's continued cooperation. Before leaving, Juan descends into Mercedes's underground tunnel of caged, mutilated children, forces her to confess to arranging Rosario's murder, and mutilates her face with his transformed hands.

Part II, set in 1983, is narrated as a stream of consciousness by Juan's adoptive guardian, Dr. Jorge Bradford, as the Darkness devours him during a Ceremonial. He relives discovering Juan as a five-year-old surgical patient in 1957 and engineering Juan's separation from his parents so the Order could control him.

Part III shifts to Buenos Aires in 1985-1986, following twelve-year-old Gaspar. He lives with his increasingly erratic father and befriends Victoria "Vicky" Peirano, Pablo Fonzi, and Adela Álvarez, who is missing her left arm. Juan's behavior swings between cruelty and tenderness: he shows Gaspar a box of severed eyelids, then teaches him about phantom limb pain, leading Gaspar to build Adela a mirror box that relieves her phantom itch. Vicky becomes obsessed with an abandoned house on Calle Villarreal that emits an insistent buzzing.

Juan's health collapses. During a supposed convalescent trip to Chascomús, Gaspar wakes covered in bruises with no memory of the past two days, convinced his father hurt him. On a midnight visit to the Costanera Sur reserve, Juan has Gaspar scatter Rosario's ashes and discovers the boy can open locked gates by willing it. Juan tells him: "You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn't cursed" (261-262). In the novel's most violent scene between father and son, Juan cuts Gaspar's arm with broken glass in a precise design and forces the boy to drink his blood, creating a protective seal to hide Gaspar from the Order. Juan's brother Luis arrives from exile in Brazil to become Gaspar's guardian.

Gaspar leads his friends into the house on Villarreal using his inherited ability to open the lock. Inside, the space is impossibly larger than its exterior and filled with shelves of human remains. Adela, drawn by an irresistible force, enters a bedroom and waves goodbye before the door seals shut behind her. She is never found. Juan dies without regaining consciousness. Gaspar collapses into guilt and psychological crisis.

Part IV is a first-person flashback narrated by Rosario, spanning 1960 to 1976. She traces the Order's history of exploiting and destroying mediums, recounts discovering Juan as a child in the Puerto Reyes jungle, and describes their years in London, where they made secret expeditions into the Other Place, a supernatural realm of bone forests and hanged bodies accessible only through doors Juan can open. She describes how Florence's younger son Eddie, driven to insanity by ritual abuse intended to make him a medium, massacred Order members at the London house before Juan killed him in the Other Place and left his body hanging from a tree. Rosario reveals the Order's demand that Juan undergo the Rite of Transfer into Gaspar's body when the boy turns twelve, and Juan's absolute refusal. She also recounts how her cousin Betty, a revolutionary guerrilla, fled to Puerto Reyes with her infant daughter Adela, whose left arm the Darkness severed during a Ceremonial.

Part V is a 1993 essay by journalist Olga Gallardo, who encounters Betty near a mass grave in Misiones and learns Adela is her daughter. When Gallardo tries to find Gaspar, she is physically unable to reach his house, repeatedly ending up on wrong streets, a manifestation of Juan's protective seal. After a threatening encounter with a one-armed man on a train, she nearly dies falling onto the tracks and abandons the investigation.

Part VI follows Gaspar's slow recovery in Villa Elisa under Luis's care. A psychiatrist rediagnoses him with post-traumatic stress disorder and possible epilepsy, and over years of treatment he stabilizes, reconnects with Vicky and Pablo, and begins a relationship with a journalism student named Marita. The crisis returns when Marita discovers Gallardo's article, which names Gaspar and details the supernatural events. Then Luis is kidnapped and left to die with a child's severed arm sewn inside his chest, the cuts on his body spelling "let him come" (560).

Gaspar flies to Puerto Reyes alone, where the Order imprisons him and tries to force him to summon the Darkness. Stephen, who has been secretly planning with Tali for years, tells Gaspar to find a door to the Other Place within the property. Through a violent flashback, Gaspar fully remembers the Rite attempted at Chascomús: his father's consciousness did briefly enter his body, but Gaspar rejected it, and Juan chose to withdraw. Gaspar begins leading the Order's members on expeditions into the Other Place. On a final journey deep into a forest of hanged bodies, Florence discovers Eddie's preserved corpse. As the members stand transfixed, the sleeping realm awakens, hungry and stirring. Gaspar and Stephen flee back through the passage. Gaspar tricks the guards into entering, then seals the door, trapping the Order inside.

The novel ends with Gaspar alone at Puerto Reyes, his supernatural symptoms gone but his grief intact. Each night he returns to the sealed door and calls for Adela, seeing visions of her walking under a starless sky. He tells the door he will come back when he is ready. The stars throb overhead "like an exhausted heart" (588), and Gaspar remains suspended between the world of the living and the dark inheritance he has claimed.