The Library Ladies Review: The Night Guest
Earlier this summer I went into the doctor for some weird symptoms that seemed to come out of nowhere. I was experiencing head spinning and elevated heart rate at times, mostly when driving, and I was worried that something was wrong. But after running tests and even putting me on a heart monitor for two weeks, the doctor wasn’t able to find anything out of the ordinary, and I ended up having to basically chalk it up to anxiety (and given that I had a massive anxiety episode a couple months later that was probably the case). But in the moment, I was very stressed about symptoms that weren’t really explainable no matter how supportive my provider was (and she was!). So there were some aspects of The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir that were personally very relatable to me, what with the question of medical mysteries and the stress that comes with it. Luckily, I can say that the relatability ended there, as this novel was supremely, SUPREMELY, creepy, and just got creepier as it went on.
I love how weird this book is. We are following the perspective of Iðunn, a woman living in Reykjavik, Iceland who has been exhausted and feeling poorly, although her medical tests are coming up without any answers. But after she buys a watch with step counts, and the counts overnight are in the tens of thousands in spite of her thinking she’s asleep, the first person POV novella slowly spirals as she becomes more and more incoherent and unhinged.
Knútsdóttir really captures a deeply disturbing tone, starting with the already kind of upsetting (but also too real) scenario of a woman dealing with medical issues that no one else can really explain, and how hopeless that can feel, and going deeper and deeper int weird territory as phantom steps, weird injuries, and other odd things begin popping up that feel connected to Iðunn. Since it’s in the first person, we really get into Iðunn’s mind and slowly learn her backstory as her perspective is crumbling more and more. I absolutely loved how bananas this descent was, and how we do learn things about her and her background and part of what may be driving her as these bizarre things are happening. It’s very much an unreliable narration story, but Knútsdóttir hits the exact right notes to make it abjectly horrifying the longer is goes on until even the reader feels like they are going mad.
One qualm? I did find the ending to be a little confusing and perhaps a little too quick. There is always a risk of going too deep into the weeds with an unreliable narrator and I think that’s what may have happened here. It’s a hard balance to strike when trying to keep a consistent tone to a character, but also having to maybe explain SOMETHING as the story wraps up. I didn’t feel like we really got that here, though I do understand that it may be a bit difficult to do so with the trajectory that Iðunn took and where she was by the ending.
I found The Night Guest to be really weird and unsettling in a really good way. Should more of Knútsdóttir’s works be translated I would definitely seek it out, what a strange and unique story this was.
Rating 7: Super creepy and very unnerving, but a frantic and confusing ending bumped my score down just a little bit.
https://thelibraryladies.com/2024/09/10/kates-review-the-night-guest/
Books, Bones & Buffy Welcomes In The Night Guest
A perfectly paced page-turner that will keep you guessing, The Night Guest is a small gem of a terrifying story
The Night Guest is written by Icelandic author Hildur Knútsdóttir and translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, and even though I don’t read a lot of translated fiction, it’s one of the best I’ve read. This is a short, unsettling story where the horror is mostly implied rather than stated, and I think that’s one reason I loved it so much. You have to really know your craft to write something scary without being obvious and beating your reader over the head, and Knútsdóttir did a great job with just that. I read this in a matter of hours, helped by the fact that the chapters are short and punchy, and the no-frills writing style makes for a quickly paced story.
The story is narrated by a young woman named Iðunn, who is worried that something terrible is wrong with her. She wakes up each morning exhausted, with sore muscles and even bruises she doesn’t remember getting. Convinced that she might have a disease of some kind, she visits her doctor, only to be told that her bloodwork confirms that everything is normal. Iðunn’s friends tell her to exercise more, and maybe she’ll feel better, so she gets a watch to keep track of her daily steps.
But one night she forgets to take off the watch and wakes up to a shocking surprise: during the night, she walked over 40,000 steps. Where did she go? Is she sleepwalking? And why does she sometimes wake up with blood under her fingernails? Iðunn is determined to get her life back, and so she starts to investigate her strange, nighttime activities.
The Night Guest is a tension-filled story that gets weirder and weirder the more you read. The author drops little hints about what might be going on with Iðunn (which I won’t spoil here), so I did have an idea of what to expect, but ultimately I was surprised by the outcome. Knútsdóttir makes some pointed statements about women and healthcare—which appears to be a universal problem!—as Iðunn keeps visiting her doctor with her upsetting symptoms, and yet is told there is nothing wrong with her. We eventually find out that she’s experiencing something otherworldly and isn’t crazy at all, and therein lies the beauty of the author’s point. For every woman who has ever had a doctor say those words to you, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
Some readers might be frustrated by the ambiguous ending. Not everything is fully explained, and the author leaves it up to the reader to interpret what’s really happening to Iðunn. Personally, I didn’t mind this style of storytelling, because it made her experiences even scarier. The Night Guest is the perfect story to pick up for a quick, creepy read, and I look forward to Hildur Knútsdóttir’s next book.
https://booksbonesbuffy.com/2024/09/12/the-night-guest-by-hildur-knutsdottir-review/
The Los Angeles Public Library Talks
What was your inspiration for The Night Guest?
I have had unexplained bouts of fatigue a couple of times a year for the past few years. I wake up bone tired and feel as if I have been dancing all night or helping someone move, and doctors found nothing wrong with me. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that these bouts usually manifested themselves just after I turned in a book to my editor, and they were definitely stress-related. So they still happen, but now I know they will pass. But they started me wondering: What would it be like to wake up exhausted and find proof that you did not spend the night in your bed, but you have no memory of where you went or what you were doing there? So the idea for The Night Guest was born.
Are Iðunn, or any of the other characters in the novella, inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Not deliberately. But I guess you are always stealing from someone or something in your life. But I just want to state for the record that I have an excellent relationship with both my older sister and my mother.
How did the novella evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters, scenes, or stories that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
So I think I have written around… 25 books? And this is probably the one that I have revised the least of all of them. I came up with the story when I was in the middle of writing a very complex YA trilogy that I had to finish first. So the story of Iðunn stayed with me for a long time before I could actually sit down and write it, so I had already worked out all the kinks beforehand in my head and knew exactly what was going to happen. I wrote it in about three weeks, and I barely changed a word in the manuscript. There were, however, some edits on the translation, but they were all something relating to cultural differences between Iceland and the US, just really making sure readers got the context of some things, like how the health care system works, etc.
Your biography says you were born and live in Reykjavík. Do you have any favorite places? A hidden gem that someone visiting should not miss but would only learn about from a resident?
Of course I do! Iceland and Reykjavík get a lot of tourists, and we have a few hidden places that we keep secret from the tourists. But I obviously cannot tell the internet about them, as I would be shunned from Icelandic society. But if you meet me in Iceland and buy me a beer, I might tell you.
You've written works of fiction for both adults and young adults. You've also written short stories, plays, and screenplays. Is there a format that you prefer over the others?
Not really. One of the things I love about writing is that you have these different forms of storytelling, and when you get a new idea for a story, you can choose the format that best serves that story. That being said, I have written many more novels and novellas than I have scripts and plays, and that does come more easily to me, probably because I have a lot more practice in that form.
In your Acknowledgements, you mentioned that you met the book’s English translator Mary Robinette Kowal, at IceCon, a science fiction & and fantasy convention in Reykjavík. You also state that if you hadn't met her, readers might never have had the chance to read The Night Guest. Can you tell us a bit about how you met and how she helped get The Night Guest into the hands of readers?
IceCon is probably one of the tiniest SFFH conventions in the world. They always have one Icelandic guest of honor and a couple of international guests of honor as well. And in the fall of 2021, I was the Icelandic guest of honor. The book had just come out in Icelandic, and I was talking about it and read a short chapter in Icelandic. Afterward, Mary Robinette, who was another guest there, asked me if I had a US agent. I wasn't looking for one, but I was open to it, so she connected me with her agent and very graciously offered to translate a part of The Night Guest and the book sold the book to a US publisher in just a couple of weeks. It all happened really fast, and nobody was more surprised at those turns of events than I was.
The Night Guest could make a truly unsettling film. If it was being adapted, who would your dream cast be?
Thank you. I agree that it would probably work well as a film! I don't have a dream cast. What I find exciting about seeing adaptations of my work is to see other people's interpretations of it. There is a reason I am a writer and not an actor, director, or casting director. I have a version of Iðunn in my mind, and if a film is ever made, I am much more interested in seeing other creative people's version of Iðunn on the screen rather than my own, if that makes sense.
I have never really understood writers who are very protective when it comes to adaptations. I have already written my version of the story; it exists in the book, and that version stays there regardless of how a movie turns out.
Are you a fan of the Horror genre?
I am! I love everything horror, except people being horrible to other people. There is so much of that in the real world; it's in the news constantly, and that's why I prefer stories about monsters or supernatural beings being horrible to people. And I can never resist a monster in space!
I am not very into slasher horror unless the one doing all the slashing is not a human. And if I am watching a movie or a TV show and there is a naked, sexy female corpse on a table in full view, I turn that off or walk out of the theater.
Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
I'm really sorry, but I don't think I can. There are so many books that have influenced me in different ways. Some because I thought they were really good, and others because I thought they were really bad. For example, there was a book I had heard about, and the plot seemed intriguing from what I read on the back. And then I read the book, hated it, and thought: "I could probably do better than that." And maybe that is what made me attempt to write my first novel. But other people loved that book, and it would be unfair to name it, so I am not going to.
Was there a book you felt you needed to hide from your parents?
No. They let me read anything I wanted to read. When I was bored, I would just pick something from the shelves at home. And I got bored a lot, so I read a lot of weird books growing up, not all of which might be described as "age-appropriate." But the only negative to that is that there were entire subplots and scenes that just went totally over my head when I was reading because I was too young to understand what was really going on. There are many great books that I have come to realize that I might have read way too soon, books I would probably have appreciated a lot more if I had found them later in life.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Not a single book, no. But books have absolutely changed my life. I read so much, and I write so much, and I actually have no idea what I would be doing with my life if it didn't revolve around books.
What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
Any version of sleeping in, eating good food, and meeting friends.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a horror novella about a goddess from Norse Mythology who did not make it into the canon in the Edda's and was therefore lost from history—until my protagonists find her, of course, on a remote Icelandic island. I am also writing a YA-fantasy that takes place in an alternative Iceland with monsters and megafauna.
https://lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/interview-author-hildur-knutsdottir
Hildur Knútsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1984. She has lived in Spain, Germany, and Taiwan and studied literature and creative writing at The University of Iceland. She writes fiction both for adults and teenagers, as well as short fiction, plays, and screenplays. Hildur is known for her evocative fantastical fiction and spine-chilling horror. The Night Guest is her first book translated into English. She lives in Reykjavík with her husband, their two daughters, and a puppy called Uggi.