Nuestra parte de noche

A father and son cross Argentina by road, from Buenos Aires to Iguazú Falls, on the northern border with Brazil. These are the years of the military junta, there are controls of armed soldiers and tension in the environment. The son is called Gaspar and the father tries to protect him from the fate that has been assigned to him. The mother died in unclear circumstances, in an accident that perhaps was not.

Like his father, Gaspar is called to be a medium in a secret society, the Order, which contacts the Darkness in search of eternal life through atrocious rituals. In them it is vital to have a medium, but the fate of these beings endowed with special powers is cruel, because their physical and mental wear and tear is fast and relentless. The origins of the Order, ruled by the powerful family of Gaspar’s mother, go back centuries, when the knowledge of the Darkness came from the heart of Africa to England and from there spread to Argentina.

The reader will find in these pages houses whose interior changes; passageways that hide unimaginable monsters; rituals with fierce and ecstatic human sacrifices; adventures in the psychedelic London of the sixties, where Gaspar’s mother met a young androgynous singer named David; human eyelids turned into fetishes; enigmatic sexual liturgies; the relationship between parents and children, with the burden of an atrocious inheritance; and, in the background, the repression of the military dictatorship, the disappeared and, later, the uncertain arrival of democracy, the first outbreaks of AIDS in Buenos Aires…

Supernatural terror intersects with very real terrors in this disturbing and dazzling novel, which establishes Mariana Enriquez as a fundamental writer of 21st century Latin American letters.