Icelandic speculative fiction in translation has begun to make its mark on the Anglophone literary world, especially in the realm of horror fiction. Since 2012, English-language readers have been able to enjoy novels and stories by such Icelandic authors as Andri Snær Magnason, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Sjón, Steinar Bragi, Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson, and now Hildur Knútsdóttir. Thanks, as well, to the 2023 anthology Nordic Visions, Anglophone readers can get an even better sense of the range of Nordic SFT available to them.
Like the more well-known Nordic horror and thriller texts by Jo Nesbø (Norway) and John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden), many of the stories coming out of Iceland feed into the idea of a dark realm intruding onto reality, often driven by murder and revenge. And while Magnason and Sjón’s texts fit more into the science fiction category, those by Sigurðardóttir, Bragi, and Vilhjálmsson are more horror than anything else.
Hildur Knútsdóttir’s first novel available in English—The Night Guest—is the latest in this burgeoning horror tradition, with its slow, deliberate buildup and overwhelming sense of the supernatural overlaid on the daily life of an unsuspecting middle-aged woman, Iðunn. Skillfully translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, the story opens with Iðunn struggling against what she fears is a developing, debilitating disease. Every morning she wakes up feeling like she’s been hit by a truck or dragged on a hundred-mile march. As time goes on, she even finds rust and dirt under her nails, blood on various parts of her body, and massive bruises. Having just broken up with the married man with whom she was having an affair, Iðunn wonders if the stress has gotten to her, but the physical manifestations of violence on her body convince her otherwise. Doctors are no help and all of the tests they run show that she’s healthy, so Iðunn decides to buy a pedometer and activate the tracker on her iPhone to figure out what is happening to her at night.
Her fears of sleep-walking are confirmed when she wakes up to find that she’s walked tens of thousands of steps in the middle of the night. The tracker shows that she keeps returning to one particular spot at Reykjavík’s Grandi harbor. Eventually, Iðunn’s curiosity and desperation drive her to make the journey there while awake, and her discovery is particularly grisly. She learns why the cats in her neighborhood have been disappearing and shunning her, while before they had all sought out her company: a shed at the harbor contains the mutilated bodies of those cats. Iðunn is sickened by this and wonders if her sleep-walking self is the one responsible.
Knútsdóttir subtly weaves clues throughout the novel, introducing the fact that Iðunn’s sister died some time before (under mysterious circumstances) and that her current lover was once in a relationship with that sister. As Iðunn tries everything to avoid going back to Grandi at night (including locking herself in her house, to no avail), her ex-boyfriend starts pressuring her to come back to him even as her current boyfriend wants to draw closer. It will come as no surprise that the two men come to as unfortunate an ending as the neighborhood cats.
The abrupt and strange finale of The Night Guest, though, leaves the reader wanting more of an explanation. Knútsdóttir’s introduction of the sister about a quarter of the way into the book, and subsequent oblique references, alerts us to the fact that this woman will have something to do with Iðunn’s nighttime adventures. The novel’s ending, meanwhile, invokes Nordic folktales about sea creatures, specifically mermen/mermaids. But it’s all so sudden and brief that there’s little time for the reader to grasp any of it. Numerous questions come to mind as well: is Iðunn possessed by the spirit of her dead sister? Has her sister always been a water spirit who returned to her natural state but is now possessing Iðunn for some reason? Is her sister trying to get Iðunn to take revenge on the community that allowed her to be murdered/pushed her to suicide? And (this is a major question) why the cats?
Early reviews of The Night Guest have argued that it is a heart-pounding supernatural thriller, but this reader saw it quite differently. Nothing about this story was particularly terrifying; it was more interesting and engaging than scary. Knútsdóttir is adept at pulling the reader along through the narrative, even writing chapters that contain just a few tantalizing words (Chapter 84, for instance, reads “I wake up in my bed. My hands are covered in blood.”). And while the protagonist is a well-drawn, convincing character—a middle-aged woman going to an uninteresting job, having meaningless affairs, going to her parents’ for dinner once a week—her lovers and friends are quite flat and all seem to function as props for this story about Iðunn. It’s as if Knútsdóttir came up with the idea of a woman having unexplained nocturnal adventures, and then hastily built the rest of the set around this mystery. A story like this should have been more thoroughly developed to be effective. Nonetheless, The Night Guest is a welcome addition to the growing list of Icelandic SF in translation available to Anglophone readers, and this reader looks forward to reading more of her work.