As one of the buzziest translated works of 2024, “The Night Guest” by Hildur Knutsdottir brings some Icelandic horror to a wider audience. Translated into sparse English prose by Mary Robinette Kowal, the novella builds tension and intrigue through economic sentences.
“The Night Guest” is written exclusively from the perspective of Idunn, a middle management office worker in Reykjavik, who is suffering from an ongoing case of sleepwalking and exhaustion.
Idunn encounters sexist and dismissive medical practitioners, nosey co-workers, and unsolicited advice from friends she secretly judges all while attempting to resolve her sleepless nights. “The Night Guest” is her unnerving journey.
Character Analysis
Main Characters
Idunn
Dr. Asdis Omarsdottir
Stefan
Mar
Stina
Ingunn
Idunn, only surviving daughter for her parents, is 55, single, childless, and works a boring job in an office building in Reykjavík, Iceland. For the last few months, she has awakened exhausted with unexplained aches and pains. Blood tests and other examinations show no signs of illness, but Idunn remains unconvinced.
She requests a younger female doctor and meets Dr. Adis Omarsdottir, who listens to her complaints and takes them seriously. Idunn respects the resident and her decisions, but she doesn’t take the doctor’s advice to see a psychologist. Most of Idunn’s interactions with the doctor are through the patient portal.
A few weeks before the story opens, Idunn broke up with her married lover, Stefan, whom she met at work. The former couple don’t work on the same floor, but Idunn anxiously avoids running into him and declines to return any of his messages. Stefan called her a bitch when she ended their affair.
Idunn’s nosy co-worker Stina exacerbates Idunn’s irritability and self-consciousness about her sleep deprivation and marks on her body. Nearly every day Stina makes unsolicited comments about Idunn’s appearance or mood.
While out with friends, Idunn runs into Mar, a man who briefly dated her deceased sister, decades ago. He continues to be so enamored with his former girlfriend’s memory that he initially mistakes Idunn for the late Ingunn. Despite his weird obsession with her older sister, Idunn agrees to date and sleep with Mar.
Senior by two years, Ingunn, acted as the golden child of the family. Her unexpected drowning death as a young woman caused an unspoken rift in the unit and forced Idunn to forgo her ambitions to serve as a replacement. Ingunn woke Idunn from a deep sleep to confide in her sibling about boys, parties, and other events.
Plot Summary
Originally published in 2021, “The Night Guest” centers on the experiences of middle-aged Idunn as she works to get her sleep disorder diagnosed.
The 55-year-old invests in an expensive watch that acts like a pedometer and has GPS to monitor her movements throughout the night. Idunn relies on it to inform her of how much she’s walking at night. Each day, she sees thousands of unexplained steps on her watch.
Idunn believes her symptoms were dismissed and her concerns ignored by an older male doctor. So, she requests an appointment with a younger female physician and is assigned to Dr. Adis Omarsdottir, whom Idunn views as a niece she can be proud of.
Although Dr. Omarsdottir listens attentively to Idunn’s concerns, she cannot find anything medically wrong with her new patient. She begrudgingly agrees to prescribe sleeping pills to Idunn via the patient portal.
Idunn is grateful for the support and medication but suffers intense paranoia that she will lose access to the prescription. The pills arrive, and she takes them to find they only work for the first night.
She even increases the dose to no avail, then finds the pills removed from their hiding place a few days later. Idunn cannot recall moving them during the night, but no one else had access.
Idunn continues to start each day exhausted with random aches in her shoulders, back, and other body parts. She forces herself to go to work, have weekly dinners with her parents, and socialize with her older married friends with children without calling attention to her ongoing and unresolved ailment.
Most days, Idunn walks to her office job and diligently works to avoid her married ex-lover Stefan and overbearing colleague, Stina. The single middle-aged woman worries Stina will notice bruises on her body and how tired she feels.
One evening, while out with friends, Idunn meets Mar, a man who is struck by how closely she resembles her deceased sister, Ingunn. The successful businessman quickly charms Idunn, and they begin to casually date.
Idunn’s unease with her sleeping disorder increases as her relationship with Mar progresses. She doesn’t want to sleep over at his house or risk injuring him in the night.
She’s also become aware that most of the neighborhood cats she passes and pets daily are missing. And the few remaining ones growl at her when she comes near.
After deciding to activate the GPS feature of the watch, Idunn learns she sleepwalks to Grandi harbor district on the west shore. Her unconscious body takes different routes to the same rundown, abandoned location each night.
The array of bruises, aches and pains Idunn suffers prevents her from going to work. So, she stays home and makes an appointment with a psychiatrist, who advises her to check into the psychiatric ward. His recommendation comes after Idunn confides to him that she believes someone else is taking her to Grandi.
Despite her worries about another being using her body at night, Idunn invites Mar over for a casual date. He brings fast food, they watch a movie and drink wine, have sex, and fall asleep together at her apartment. She awakes happy until he mentions their second sexual encounter, which makes her hands ball into fists.
Idunn reluctantly returns to work after her sick days have ended and spends her nights solving the mystery of why she’s sleepwalking to Grandi. She comes upon a flimsy red shed with an interior of deep darkness that contains the rotting corpses of several missing cats. Idunn recognizes them by the colorful collars used to strangle them even as she tries to avoid looking into their cloudy, broken eyes.
A sickly thin Idunn agrees to another date with Mar, who once again turns the conversation to Ingunn. He comments that her death came as a shock to him even as he laments the lack of barriers on the harbor and notes freezing water is a peaceful way to die. Idunn kisses him as a way to change the conversation, then wakes up alone in bed fearing she did something terrible to Mar.
She texts a vague apology but receives no response.
As a last resort, Idunn decides to caffeinate herself to stay awake and avoid sleep. This works well for three days until she agrees to meet up with Stefan. They go out for a drink, then she finds herself at home in bed. Stina gossips to her the next day that Stefan has gone missing.
Several days pass with Idunn waking and sleeping a normal schedule as she goes to work. She feels a sense of normality before learning the news of Mar’s disappearance.
Idunn knows he’s in the shed at Grandi. She walks there with a purpose, turns on her cell phone flashlight and finds a tightly bound and gagged Mar on the floor. His eyes widen with fear at seeing her.
She then hears a monotonous chanting that a skeletal version of Ingunn speaks while crouched in the corner of the shed. The two women survey each other before Ingunn hugs her younger sister who cuts Mar free of his bindings.
Reunited on the harbor, the sisters come together with Idunn carrying Ingunn on her back toward the dark water. Idunn runs into the cold ocean up to her hips before beginning to float on her back with Ingunn’s arms around her neck and feet around her hips.
They float together and see the dark between the twinkling stars.
Final Thoughts
“The Night Guest” is a deceptively simple read with many one-sentence chapters. Knutsdottir formatted the story to delay reader gratification and to demonstrate Idunn’s escalating anxiety and crumbling well-being.
Many readers will be disappointed and frustrated by the lack of a clear ending. The ambiguity of the conclusion requires readers to fill in deliberately obfuscated information about the relationship between Idunn and her family.
For those undeterred by unstated or implied plot points, “The Night Guest” is a feminist horror novella worthy of your time.
Rating
My rating is 3.75/5 stars.
Book Details
Book Title: “The Night Guest”
Author: Hildur Knutsdottir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal
Year of Publication: 2021 and translated into English in 2024
Number of Pages: 192
See the review of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for another short work of a woman’s descent into madness.
