Publishers Weekly
★ 11/06/2023
Knútsdóttir’s surreal and spectacular English-language debut, crisply translated by multiple Hugo award winner Kowal, finds protagonist Iðunn suffering from chronic exhaustion that the medical establishment has, through a combination of neglect and incompetence, failed to treat, leading her to use a number of ersatz self-care solutions. When she wears a step-counting watch to bed one night, she wakes up achy, smelling of the nearby ocean, and having apparently walked more than 40,000 steps in her sleep. As her personal life and relationships crumble due to depression and fatigue, her mysterious nocturnal activities leave her with bizarre wounds. At her wit’s end, Iðunn sets up her phone in the corner of the room to record what she does after she goes to sleep—and what she discovers sets off a horrifying chain of events that threatens every aspect of her waking life. Knútsdóttir’s parenthetical asides and idiosyncratic voice create a queasy sense of vertigo as the story unfolds, and the time the narrative takes to reveal its secrets is well spent on the way to a conclusion at once grotesque and beautiful. This is psychological horror at its finest. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"The Night Guest is evocative and powerfully restrained. At times chilling, at others harrowingly familiar, The Night Guest is a fascinating examination of femininity, agency, and self, and a genuinely heart-pounding read."—Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six
"From its opening pages, Hildur Knútsdóttir's eerie and elegant The Night Guest wraps its icy fingers around you and pulls you in. It's so atmospheric, so well-crafted, and so truly, deeply unsettling that by the end, you feel every bit as haunted as its sleepless heroine. If you're a horror fan—or just a fan of great writing in general—you need to have this one on your radar!"—Rachel Hawkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs
"I inhaled this book. Not since Sarah Gran's Come Closer has every sentence sliced at the reader's heart. This book will bleed you out before you're done."—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
“Surreal and spectacular. . . . This is psychological horror at its finest.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“The Night Guest casts a hypnotic spell from page one. Its sentences break like shards of ice to reveal a cold, dark truth at its center. You can't put it down, once it has you in its thrall.”—Andy Davidson, author of The Hollow Kind
"Effortlessly alternating between dark humor and the darkest horror, The Night Guest hooked me immediately—and then proceeded to reel me in with a vivid, haunting story that evades easy answers and is all the more terrifying for it."—Sam J. Miller, award-winning author of The Blade Between
"Like the flashes of a waking nightmare, Knútsdóttir’s artful spiral of terror will have fans of Ling Ma, Paula Hawkins, and other flawed female narrators demanding more."—Booklist
"The Night Guest is a tightly woven, nasty little fable that thrums with dread. If it keeps you awake at night, you just might be grateful."—Christopher Buehlman, author of The Blacktongue Thief
"The Night Guest offers that rare experience in a horror novel: a creeping scare and a total shock. I never knew where Knútsdóttir was taking me, and the hand she held in hers was shaking with terror the whole time. Both recalling the foundations of the horror genre and bringing something completely new, The Night Guest is a brilliant work of both narration and translation."—Meg Elison, award-winning author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
"A beautifully written story: visceral, layered, and haunting. I loved every moment."—Sunyi Dean, bestselling author of The Book Eaters
“Knutsdottir has written an arresting novel about the intricacies and invisibility of female pain and the staggering cost of ignoring it.”—New York Journal of Books
"The Night Guest perfectly captures the horror of enduring ordinary life while knowing something is terribly wrong. The steady build of mystery and dread kept me turning pages toward a dark and gripping end!”—Melissa Caruso, author of The Obsidian Tower
"Crisp, unsentimental prose accentuates the dread in this dark tale... there's simply nowhere to hide and no way to look away from each new, unsettling development. The Night Guest never shies away from asking us to think about the last time we really saw someone, and what it means to feel seen... and what happens when no one is looking."—Premee Mohamed, author of Beneath the Rising
"The Night Guest pulls us by our throats down Reykjavik midnight streets in an unraveling nightmare, so much grief and fear and all we may be capable of leaving their marks beneath our fingernails and behind our eyes. This book moved, thrilled, and terrified me. Atmospheric, witty, frightening, electrifying, I would walk those nightmare streets again and again with Knútsdóttir. I absolutely loved it."—CJ Leede, author of Maeve Fly
“Utterly terrifying. There’s nothing more frightening than not being able to trust yourself. Gave me second—and third—thoughts about going to sleep at night!”—S.A. Barnes, author of Dead Silence
"Knútsdóttir will hook readers with her first title to be translated into English. For fans of disorienting psychological horror marked by extreme tension and familial trauma.”—Library Journal
Library Journal
06/01/2024
IÐunn, a young professional in Iceland, has no trouble falling asleep, but she keeps waking up exhausted. After accidentally leaving her smartwatch on all night, she wakes up and sees that she has walked thousands of steps overnight. Told solely from IÐunn's perspective as she quickly spirals, this novel conveys her horror as she tries to stop herself from sleepwalking, figures out she is doing horrible things in her sleep, both to herself and others, and then starts to realize why and who is behind it all. The gripping tension of the plot is underscored by the physical layout of the book; multiple pages contain only one desperate line of text, followed by an extra blank page, allowing readers to physically feel the tension as they feverishly flip the pages. But readers beware, cats are harmed in this story. VERDICT Knútsdóttir will hook readers with her first title to be translated into English. For fans of disorienting psychological horror marked by extreme tension and familial trauma, such as in The Grip of It by Jac Jemc, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and anything by Catriona Ward.
