Synopsis:
Iðunn is in yet another doctor’s office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something’s not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven’t revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same – have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps. Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . . What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?
Review:
Fast but feral “The Night Guest,” by Hildur Knútsdóttir took about an hour to read, with its teeny tiny chapters and lean (yet mean) prose, and is a novella that can only be described as bingeable. This was more moorish than a bag of tangy cheese doritos- it demands to be devoured. What starts off as a compulsive thriller swiftly descends (or ascends, depending on how you look at it) into something far darker and more macabre (ergo, it gets more interesting). A novella in free fall that digs its claws in and does not let go until you’ve finished, this has a similar, ambiguous plummet into madness to Sara Gran’s hit “Come Closer.” The word to highlight however is ambiguous, as the plot unravels, as does all sense of certainty. A head scratcher that demands interpretation, I’ll be thinking about this one for a good long while. Regardless of where you ended up in terms of plot (is it a revenge story? A good example of the “Returned wrong,” trope? Is it simply a meditation on mental health?) the denouement is grisly and the novella is an utter triumph.
We follow Iðunn who finds herself constantly exhausted. She’s not an insomniac, she can get to sleep just fine, and to the best of her knowledge sleeps through until morning, but regardless of how many hours of shut eye she gets, she’s still drained, deprived, depleted when she gets up. She’s constantly waved off with dismissive smiles, misdiagnosed, overlooked and patronised by just about every doctor she’s seen. So, she takes matters into her own hands, investing in an expensive watch that tracks steps, and bpm and all that health stuff. When she falls asleep with it still on one night, she finds that she has done 40,000+ steps on the pedometer overnight. The watch isn’t broken, and when she consults the corresponding app, she finds that she heads to the same harbour every unconscious, late night escapade.
The similarities to Sara Gran’s “Come Closer,” extend beyond an ambiguous ending and unreliable narrator, in that it also really scared me. It has that same loss of agency and automatism. The horror of “The Night Guest,” lies in Iðunn’s unreliable grasp upon her own reality- the erosion of control, the realisation that her own body is acting against her. The slasher in the woods and ghost in the attic sure are scary, but in a way, comforting. There’s a clear enemy. Something that can be taken down. The lack of something tangible, killable, or even identifiable is what makes these novels so damn terrifying. The threat is inherent, and the protagonist finds the horror within themselves, as Amanda and Iðunn do respectively- and in my experience, that’s far scarier.
Sleep is sacred. It’s a sanctuary, a reset, a retreat, a biological necessity, and a constant that can (should) be relied upon through chaos and instability. The horrors of the day are forgotten. But here it is not restful or restorative or something that is looked forward to. Horror thrives on instability, and Knútsdóttir capitalises on this by instead representing sleep as a stage for something dark and strange and exploitative and parasitic. What should be safe and unassailable becomes a driver of horror, a state of vulnerability as opposed to relaxation. Sleep related horror is not a new phenomenon, it is very clearly ripe for horror, but “The Night Guest,” is not concerned with nightmares or dream realms. Rather than an absence of consciousness, Knútsdóttir is concerned with the occupation of it. Just to reiterate: scary stuff.
Worse still? Yeah, I know, Iðunn is left to work through this whole debacle alone. For one she lives alone, but surely there’d be some medical advice or assistance she can seek? Wrong. Until she demands a female doctor she is dismissed and failed and essentially told that there is no obvious explanation, and thus she is making it up. Brushed off with the indifference countless (women in particular) have received from the institutions designed to provide help. It’s disgusting and a frustration that is all too real. She’s not believed by the experts to the point where not only a subtle medical horror element is introduced, but to the point of complete isolation.
A novella that unsettles in that it refuses to settle itself, “The Night Guest,” by Hildur Knútsdóttir ticks a ridiculous amount of boxes, albeit largely in its ambiguity. The horror of it is omnipresent. The dread and disappointment of institutional failure, the blatant gaslighting and misdiagnosis, the terror of knowing something is wrong and not being believed. It’s the suffocating paranoia of not trusting your own mind, of waking up with blood on your hands. And just when you think you have a grasp on it, it veers into something primal, something existential, something supernatural, or maybe something that defies those labels. Its refusal to offer answers is one of its many terrifying aspects. Whilst sleep is not guaranteed for those who choose to pick this one up, perhaps that’s a mercy.
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