OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

When I think of horror stories, I think of Stephen King, but this book is not on a par with his stuff at all.  In fact, it is Dull with a capital D and totally lacks suspense.  Maybe some of its punch was lost in translation, but I doubt it.  The first part of the book is about Juan Peterson, whose parents sold him as a child to the Order—a privileged group of sorcerers.  Juan is a medium who can summon the Darkness—a supernatural presence which supposedly has the power to grant immortality.  The Darkness, however, gets hungry, and the members of the Order are happy to supply the Darkness with human sacrifices.  Yep.  Also, anyone who ventures too close to the Darkness is likely to lose a limb.  Summoning the Darkness takes its toll on Juan’s fragile physical health, and the Order wants his son Gaspar to take over his duties.  Juan does everything in his power to protect Gaspar from becoming the Order’s puppet, and sometimes his protection techniques are violently abusive, causing Gaspar to be quite conflicted about his relationship with his father.  The dynamic between Gaspar and Juan was, for me, what gave the novel some heart, but otherwise it’s just a long and unpleasant slog through cemeteries, mass graves, and houses that are bigger on the inside than on the outside.