Genre: horror novella
Published: Tor Nightfire, September 2024 (originally published in Icelandic by JPV, 2021)
My Rating: 3.5/5 conflicted stars
“I come to the realization that it’s not just twinkling stars ahead of me. There’s also the dark between them.”
In 2024, I’ve completely leaned into my “novella-era”, learning to embrace the power of a short book that condenses all its punches down to a limited amount of pages. The Night Guest , a fever dream of psychological terrors at night, unfolds in just under 200 pages, and fits into this category perfectly. Although the first 100 to 150 pages were absolute top notch, the ending left me (not unlike the protagonist) with a bit of a bitter aftertaste.
The Story:
Iðunn has been plagued by a range of unexplained symptoms for months now. Despite sleeping through the night, she wakes exhausted and with strange bruises and body-aches, as if she’s spent the night running a marathon, rather than resting in her bed. Following the advice of her friends, she purchases a smartwatch, to help her improve her overall fitness, in hopes that it’ll alleviate her symptoms. Instead she discovers something alarming; after yet another unrestful night, her smartwatch shows she’s walked over 40000 steps… overnight… How, whereto and why? This is only the beginning of an investigation into her own life in the dark…
What I loved:
The Night Guest nails its tense and foreboding atmosphere from the start. Tightly paced, claustrophobically atmospheric and translated absolutely seamlessly from the original Icelandic (truly, massive credits to Mary Robinette Kowal who did an amazing job), I was hooked from start to finish and blew through this novella. There is something uniquely terrifying about “sleep horror”. The idea of something happening to your body during a time where you’re unconscious and completely out of control is (pardon the pun) nightmare fuel to me, and this book capitalizes on it to great effect.
I loved the structure, where the chapters become progressively shorter and more choppy as our protagonists mind spirals from her discoveries, and I loved the format (being a novella) for this story, as it perfectly knew not to overstay its welcome.
What I didn’t love:
Beware some plot-spoilers below
Ambiguous endings in horror novels don’t bother me. Underdeveloped ones do, and this was teetering on that edge, leaving me feeling very underwhelmed.
The novel opens with our protagonist sitting in (another!) doctors office, hoping to finally be taken seriously about her symptoms. There’s a short paragraph about the dismissal of female symptoms as “just psychological” or “being hysteric”, which I’m sure struck a note with plenty of women-readers who’ve experienced something like this themselves. How ironic then that the ending twists basically revolves around, you guessed it: our protagonist losing her mind. Honestly: I’d have taken anything else rather than this: something supernatural, a ghost or an entity possessing her, a gaslighting-scheme set up by her (boy)friends… Anything! But this half-assed split-personality-brought-on-by-grief-over-her-sisters-death-thing just wasn’t it… This was beyond disappointing, as I’d really hoped for something more original and creative and felt like the first half was hinting at.
Also, obligatory does-the-dog-die-warning: multiple cats meet gruesome ends in this one. For me personally that didn’t affect my rating, but consider yourself warned if animal-cruelty is a dealbreaker in your reading-experience.
Find this book here on Goodreads.
