The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir

TL;DR: I doubt I’ll remember this, I really do. It was… okay?
Source: Netgalley, many thanks to the publisher!

Plot: A short story about a woman loosing her mind to pain and lack of sleep.
Characters: Our only real character of note is Iðunn and I have to be honest, she wins my rarely awarded ‘Maybe Too Stupid to Live” award.
Setting: The only real setting I can recall is a bit of a spoiler, but there were not any intensely vivid ones.
Horror: I really didn’t find this very scary? I suppose I figured out the twist the ‘scare’ early and that killed the vibe.

Thoughts:

The Night Guest is billed as an ‘ensnaring’ story to keep you up at night. I’ll give it ‘ensnaring’ simply because it’s a fast read. But this one will not be keeping me up at night, and I doubt it’ll do that for anyone else. Our main character Iðunn is trapped in a familiar hell of trying to find out what’s ‘wrong’ with her. She’s tired, she’s lethargic, she seems depressed and no one will take her seriously. In the course of the 200 page novella we watch her pinpoint a cause and then find the reason for it.

It’s a dark story. We have animal abuse, murder, blood, pain, some implied violence, and grief touched on. These are just touches for the most part, the animal abuse and death was the biggest and most seemingly impactful part, but all play a role. The first of my big complaints involves that, the themes in this are presented but almost never actually explored or in some cases even seen on page. We just get gloomy character talk about them. Sure we see some of the impact in Iðunn, but nothing comes off the page to haunt me from this.

The other big complaint I have is that Iðunn is genuinely the most frustrating person to read about. She’s one of the rare characters I’m going to label ‘Too Stupid to Live’. I understand some of her frustrations, some of her worries but she refuses to take any real action to help herself. Over half of this novella could be cut out if she’d paid attention to her pedometer when she bought it. It was just so frustrating.

Ultimately this novella left me annoyed and disappointed. It’s not badly written, it’s well translated, and I didn’t completely hate my time but I’m not a huge fan.

2 out of 5 pedometers (you bought the thing for a reason, pay attention to it)