BookBrowse Reviews The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir

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Iðunn is exhausted. Every day, she wakes up feeling bone-tired, and nobody seems to take her seriously when she talks about it.

Most mornings, Iðunn wakes up bloodied, bruised, and battered, sometimes missing fingernails. She doesn't remember what happened during the night to cause this. She isn't addicted to drugs or alcohol, and, as far as she knows, she doesn't suffer from any debilitating mental illnesses. Her doctor appears to lack solutions for her. Her relationship with her family is nearly non-existent. She's running out of people to turn to. Every day, exhaustion cripples her. Her energy goes. She starts skipping work. Panic begins to set in. Little by little, she stops being able to recognize herself, and all the while, a violent ex-lover, Stefán, looms in the distance like a shark fin bobbing in the water.

What do you do when your world seems like it's falling apart all around you, and when even before the incident that set things off, you were barely holding it together? In Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest, translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal, Iðunn grapples with this question. In search of the answer, she descends into a darkness that will leave readers shocked and terrified. Knútsdóttir's novel is a horrifying look into how being a woman complicates prolonged exposure to trauma, whether it be physical, emotional, or a harrowing experience of both.

What made The Night Guest especially thrilling to me was its singular point of view as it follows Iðunn's mental decline. Her panic feels very tangible and vulnerable, and the matter-of-fact narration adds to the reader's sense of her resignation and hopelessness. When she says, "All my energy goes into trying to control my fears," her point-blank self-awareness is dreadful to witness. Tension grows around the eeriness of her bizarre situation as we follow Iðunn alone, with no outside perspectives. For most of the story, the author uses the state of her body as evidence that something happened while she was unconscious, but readers never really see what happens. Even in moments when she tries to piece together what occurred, her feelings become visceral at the horror of what may have taken place. Upon trying to fill in the blanks in her memories, she states, "A darkness carves through my chest in a downward spiral." Throughout, I was on edge from what context clues the narrative did provide, an experience that felt intimate with the point of view.

Though I enjoyed The Night Guest, I can see how it might not be right for some readers. At times the writing seems dictated, almost like a screenplay; most of the narration lists off actions and feelings explicitly, with an example being Iðunn's cataloging of one of her mornings: "I'm exhausted when I wake up. But I'm not only exhausted. I have aches all over my body. I feel like I've been helping someone move. Stumbling into the kitchen, I pour a glass of water. I drink it in one stretch and refill it." The structure is generally "I" plus a verb, or "I" pointing readers to a very specific feeling. Artistically, this choice makes it seem as if the entire novel is a personal log Iðunn keeps, tracking her every move. The narrative might serve as her way of documenting everything that happens to her, and possibly as a means of reassuring herself that she is not making everything up. She could also be using this log to connect to someone, whoever the intended audience might be: family members, medical professionals, someone else she thinks would benefit from her documentation. This is open to interpretation. The Night Guest recounts what's happening in every moment, for as long as Iðunn is conscious. If you lean into this kind of voice, the novel is probably a good fit for you.

If you enjoy more images and subtlety, and more nuance in your tension when it comes to reading different characters, this may not be your sort of thriller. As someone who generally prefers character-driven stories, there were times I felt pulled away from the overarching story since The Night Guest seemed more like a log than a series of character sketches placed in situational conflict. I would have liked to see the relationships between the characters matter a little more. I would have liked to feel a bit more uneasy or sad when certain things happened to characters, but it was hard to fully invest myself in the suspense because the relationships didn't seem that important overall. Everyone appears like a creepy stranger regardless of their true relationship to Iðunn. If that was the intention, I wish there had been more tension around the other characters. Perhaps the author could have drawn some of them out further for the sake of the stakes being higher.

Overall, The Night Guest is still a successful horror suspense story, body horror and all, and the true horror is how helpless Iðunn feels in being alienated from her family, distanced from her work, and not necessarily heard by either her doctor or her creepy lover. Even as someone who doesn't normally gravitate toward this type of novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved how psychologically tortured Knútsdóttir leaves readers, and I hope to see more of her work translated into English.

This review first ran in the September 18, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.