October 1, 2022
After his mother dies, Gaspar travels with his father to her ancestral home, where he confronts a terrible truth: her family, the Order, commits atrocities in their search for immortality, and they want him to join the clan. Argentinean Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories was a finalist for the International Booker Prize and two Los Angeles Times Book prizes; this is her first novel to be translated into English.
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Starred review from November 14, 2022
Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) twines sinister flights of occult imagination through the harsh realities of history in this decades-spanning masterpiece of literary horror. After Juan’s wife dies in 1981, a grieving Juan and his young son, Gaspar, embark on a road trip to her familial estate in Argentina, which Gaspar will inherit. The loss is made more fraught when Gaspar begins to manifest Juan’s ability to see and summon beings from the afterlife and beyond. Juan, a powerful but terminally ill medium, has long been in the grip of the Order, a cult controlled by his late wife’s family that strives for immortality while worshipping a mad and distant god. He knows that if Gaspar inherits his abilities, the cult will seize the boy to shape and use him for its own purposes. But if Gaspar hasn’t inherited, the Order plans to enact a ritual to keep Juan alive at the cost of Gaspar’s life. Juan launches a yearslong deception to save his son from the Order’s vampiric grasp, but the Order’s roots are far deeper than even Juan realizes—and its grip much harder to slither out of. Enriquez’s lush epic pulls no punches, probing the complex intimacies of familial bonds, the draw of darkness, and brutal Argentinian history. This unsettling gothic tale will leave readers shaken. Agent: María Lynch, Casanovas Lynch.
December 15, 2022
A widower burdened with paranormal abilities tries to protect his son from a dangerous cult. After two well-received story collections, most recently The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021), Enr�quez presents a sprawling gothic novel holding a black mirror toward Argentina's history of corruption and political violence and dosed with the conventions of horror fiction. Roughly told from the point of view of a father, a mother, and their son at different stages of their lives, the story can feel aimless, but the sheer dread and paranoia the author delivers are palpable, too. When we first meet Juan Peterson and his son, Gaspar, they're trying to stay under the radar of the Cult of the Shadow. This dangerous, child-murdering religious order is led by the family of Juan's wife, Rosario, who recently died in a car accident. Rosario's creepy family discovered early on that Juan is a medium who can control "the Darkness," a preternatural force that hungers for human flesh, during occult rites. Juan has always grudgingly gone along with his in-laws' wishes, participating in these ceremonies despite the terrible physical toll they take on him. But now, the cult wants to (somehow?) move his consciousness into his son's body before the Darkness takes him completely, and he's furtively trying to undermine them. He has secret allies in his sister-in-law, Tali, and Stephen, the son of the order's leader, who are helping to mask Gaspar's innate abilities. Later, a flashback to Rosario's work as an anthropologist demonstrates how mythology comes into play, while later, a grown-up Gaspar struggles with his dark inheritance. It's awkward and exhausting by turns, often by design. Somehow the shock of such violence delivered upon children and the inevitable fatigue generated by unrelenting horror also mirror the author's mistrust of reality as we know it. A strange, arcane journey into South American horror with roots in the real evil that men do.
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February 1, 2023
Argentine author Enriquez (Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2021) builds this literary horror tour de force, ably translated by McDowell, in that liminal place between artifice and reality. Juan is the powerful yet reluctant medium for the Darkness, a brutal, godlike creature revered by a secret cabal called the Order, and he seeks to protect his son, Gaspar, from inheriting his dreadful fate. Perspectives and time periods jump around, keeping readers off-kilter. The story begins with Juan's point of view as a seemingly average dad on a road trip with his son to visit grandparents in Buenos Aires. This comfortable scenario soon vanishes after Gaspar sees a ghost, and Juan teaches him how to block these recurring apparitions. Thereafter, routine gives way to horrific fantasy. The other characters include a Dr. Bradford, a journalist, Olga Gallardo, and Gaspar's mother, Rosario, who tells her story and that of the Order. While the shadow of Argentina's Dirty War looms over this novel, Enriquez implicates us all, summoning such images as children in cages and bodies hanging from trees, visceral reminders and warnings.
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February 3, 2023
This is Enriquez's first full-length novel translated into English, following her Booker Prize--shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories. After the suspicious death of his wife, Juan and their son Gaspar are on the run from a cult called the Order. Juan, raised by the Order from childhood, is a medium with fading abilities, and his son is showing a propensity for the same gift, one that the Order will stop at nothing to harness in their quest for immortality. The sense of foreboding throughout feels all too real, as the story lines jump back and forth between Argentina in the 1960s and its political struggles post-military dictatorship. While the writing is original, the story is dense, and the instances of horror are so spread out across the book's many pages that the mesmerism and mystery of the novel get lost, leaving the plot ill-defined as neither ghost nor love story. VERDICT This dense novel unfortunately lacks cohesion and, for some, might lose its appeal halfway through, despite the immersive depiction of the socio-economic landscape and well-formed characters. Readers new to Enriquez and seeking unsettling gothic horror might pick up her short story collection first.--Alana Quarles
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