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For Want of a Fingernail: Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest (Part 5)
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For Want of a Fingernail: Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest (Part 5)
Who’s up for a late night stroll to an abandoned industrial harbor?
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on June 25, 2025
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we’re reading Chapters 29-35 of Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest. The English version, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, was first published in 2024; the original was published in 2021. Spoilers ahead!
Iðunn has forgotten she’s supposed to have dinner at her parents’ house until a last-minute text from Mom asks whether she’s eating chicken these days. “No, I’ve told you this,” she texts back, only to learn that Mom’s already left the grocery store. Typical. Iðunn scrounges an oatmeal packet from the office cupboard to tide her over. Before leaving, she repowders her black eye.
There are enough side dishes with Mom’s chicken fajitas for Iðunn to make a meal. Conversation follows its usual path: Iðunn’s job, same old; Dad’s bad back; Mom may take up golf (unlikely). Mom frets about how tired Iðunn looks, but brightens to learn Iðunn went on a dinner date yesterday with Mar Thorfinnsson, who went to college with sister Ingunn.
Iðunn doesn’t mention that Ingunn and Mar had a romantic relationship. If Ingunn could overhear this omission, how she would laugh, then make a face.
From Iðunn’s vague recollection of Mar’s work, Dad assumes he’s an engineer. Iðunn would have made a good engineer, he thinks, the way she was always drawing houses, but Mom scoffs that Iðunn always wanted to study business.
In fact, Iðunn wanted to be an architect. From the distant way Mom’s looking at her, she knows Mom isn’t seeing her, but Ingunn. It was Ingunn who wanted to be a CEO. After she died, though, the roads open before Iðunn dwindled down to one.
* * *
Back home, Iðunn links her watch to her phone, then turns on the GPS location feature and wears the watch to bed. The next morning, she needn’t wonder where she went overnight: the Grandi harbor district.
* * *
Iðunn installs a latch and padlock inside her front door. Before bed, she locks herself in and hides the padlock key. Then she gets a call. Is it Mar, from whom she hasn’t heard since their first date? No. Hell. It’s from her ex, Stefan, who leaves an apologetic message and a request they meet to talk “about what happened.” Her stomach knots—how dare he, after she told him she didn’t want to sleep with a married man anymore and he slammed the door in her face, calling her a bitch?
She considers returning a nasty answer: that he sucked in bed, that she has HIV, that she’s told his wife and kids about the affair, that she’s told the police he pushed her down stairs. She holds off, because it’s “better to sleep a little on such poisoned darts, before you let them fly.”
Instead she texts Mar, who answers at once. He’s glad she’s contacted him—he’s been silent because he didn’t want to seem pushy. What a prince. And very good in bed. She suggests they get together soon, then at his “Absolutely!” remembers her black eye. She says she’s busy these days but will call shortly. Mar signs off, “Good night, beautiful.”
* * *
Iðunn wakes next morning with blood on her bedclothes, her shirt, oozing from her fingers. Her arms ache, and her nails are a torn wreck, one missing, more loose. There’s more blood on the door, where she has apparently clawed off the new latch and padlock.
She soaks her throbbing hands in warm water that turns pink but that smells like “iron and salt,” not roses.
* * *
Where she went: Back to Grandi Harbor, though by another route than the last time.
* * *
With her typing fingers all bandaged, she calls in to work. The “dark between the stars, that empty nothing, the void” fills her anxious thoughts. Finally, she goes to the Psychology Institute to see the therapist the health center referred her to. He’s unavailable, but her desperation and bandaged hands get her an appointment with another psychologist.
Hakon’s youth and scrawniness aren’t encouraging, but his office is IKEA-cozy and lightly vanilla-scented. Of course, he notices her bandaged hands. When he asks how she is, she tells him everything.
“And you think you’re sleepwalking?” he asks after she finishes her story. No, Iðunn replies. Then, for the first time, she dares to say, “I don’t think it’s me. I think it’s someone else.”
But she’s afraid to name that someone.
The Degenerate Dutch: Ex Stefan doesn’t deviate from the usual script for a married lover, spewing misogynistic insults when rebuffed, then sending insincere requests for forgiveness and reconciliation.
Weirdbuilding: Fingernail removal horror, oh ick eek ick. Ruthanna still bears all-too-strong mental images from that one scene in Firestarter, and didn’t need another set.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Iðunn fears “that there might be nothing wrong—that it might all be just in my head.” But ultimately, the strain of this week’s chapters sends her to the long-avoided therapist.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Ingunn. That’s her name.
We’re getting to know a lot about her, both as Iðunn’s unwelcome guest and as the living person she once was. As a guest, she’s exactly the sort to overstay her welcome: selfish, hogging all the resources, and ignoring all hints that it’s time to leave. She knows she’s doing these things, and doesn’t seem to care about her effect on Iðunn. And she deeply resents Iðunn’s attempts to constrain her. Sleeping pills and locks result in painful misuse of her host’s body, either as punishment or in some desperate panic to avoid losing her moments of “life.” She doesn’t care, though, when Iðunn just tries to learn; she thinks the phone video is amusing and ignores the watch. And she doesn’t seem to share any of Iðunn’s knowledge—she doesn’t know where the key for the lock is hidden, for example. Nor does she seem capable of the sort of systematic planning that Iðunn uses against her—her reactions to barriers seem more reflexive, like a caged animal.
As a living person, she doesn’t sound like she was especially nice either. Charismatic, sure: the sort to enthrall easily-discarded lovers, and to consider “CEO” rather than just “businessperson” a reasonable career path. (By the way, did you know that well-compensated psychopaths often become CEOs?) She appreciated her sister as an audience, and perhaps as a target of violent anger. She expected the world to give her what she wanted, and for the most part it did. She was the sort of person that other people really look at. The sort that people remember and want to spend time around.
Iðunn, unfortunately, doesn’t share her sister’s magnetism. If there’s a commonality among her relationships, it’s not merely the lack of intimacy and the tendency to fall into easy, unsatisfying scripts—it’s that people don’t really look at her. She goes unseen, even by her parents. Her father vaguely remembers her childhood ambitions; her mother replaces them with Ingunn’s. Also Ingunn’s are the travel plans, and presumably the carnivorous appetites. Is Mom’s constant refusal to remember the offspring in front of her an outgrowth of mourning? Or has it always been this way—Ingunn’s desires known and tracked, Iðunn’s neglected?
Maybe a little of both. Before Ingunn’s death, Iðunn says, “all roads were open to me.” Afterwards, “only one.” If Ingunn wasn’t going to be able to be Ingunn, someone else had to do it, even to choosing a career path. Even, now, to literally being Ingunn at night.
I have often thought that one of the underrated curses of being a vampire must be the sheer inconvenience of how many things are closed during your active hours. If you want to buy groceries or mail packages, you’d better get those thralled servants lined up, because you yourself are inanimate during business hours. Worse still for Ingunn, who isn’t merely limited to the hours of darkness (which in Iceland would be more seasonal than daily), but to Iðunn’s sleep cycle. Normal life is out of the question, never mind an MBA. So she spends her time in the Grandi Harbor district, not yet a gentrified tourist area. Perhaps a place to enthrall some servants—and get them running some disturbing errands?
Anne’s Commentary
Twenty-nine chapters in, we finally learn the name of Iðunn’s sister. It’s (drum roll): Ingunn! Ingunn and Iðunn, those names could do for a pair of twins, couldn’t they, but these sisters were born two years apart, with Ingunn the elder. Ingunn combines the Old High German/Old English name Ing (Yngvi, in Old Norse) with the Old Norse verb unna, to love. Norse mythology has it that Yngvi was the progenitor of the Yngling dynasty of Swedish (also early Norwegian) kings; Ing/Yngvi might be an earlier name for the god Freyr, who was in charge of fertility, prosperity, and good weather, also peace and kingship. According to Britannica, he and his sister Freyja (goddess of love, fertility, battle, and death—nice combo) held the boar as sacred and figured in much medieval Icelandic lore. Thus we can associate sister Ingunn with one who loves fertility, prosperity, peace, good weather, and kingship. No wonder she wanted to be a CEO.
Iðunn combines the Old Norse prefix ið, again or repeated, with unna, to love. She was goddess of spring and rejuvenation, a job which included keeping the apples of immortality the gods relied on for their eternal good looks and vitality. She’s married to Bragi, god of poetry, whose copyrights she keeps perpetual, I take it. This one time, everyone’s favorite Norse god, Loki, turned her into a nut, or a sparrow, long story, but she got better. I’m not sure how all this connects with novel-Iðunn wanting to be an architect, unless architects love repetition, spring, apples and Botox. Anyway, reading too much meaning into all this lineage, etymology, and mythology stuff is what rendered the old kings of Gondor infertile and ended their line. Just a little public service caveat.
The next big revelation is that the night-wandering Iðunn keeps going to the same place: Reykjavik’s Grandi harbor district, which she calls “an industrial blight” and which she’ll later describe as a place of “rusty containers, flimsy sheds, wire rolls, barrels, grease.” An industrial area, yes, but “no industry seems to have happened here for a long time.”
Grandi was the old harbor of the city, built on a sandy strip that connected Reykjavik to Orfirisey Island. Landfills and construction would over time expand its area. The original harbor was long the center of fishing, trading, fish processing plants and shipyards. In 1962, a new commercial port (Sundahofn) was built east of the old harbor, and much of Grandi’s industry moved there. I guess that sometime between the migration to Sundahofn and the mid-2000s, the old harbor sank into Iðunn’s “blight.” A significant renovation effort began around 2007, with the repurposing of old fisherman’s shacks into shops and studios. Construction began on the Harpa concert hall, which was completed in 2010. In 2018, the Grandi Matholl, a street food hall, opened in a former fish factory. Restaurants, museums, and tourist attractions followed. Currently, Grandi’s a shiny hub of social and cultural activity unsuitable for the kind of urban noir prowling Iðunn’s “guest” seems to have been up to. I guess that would place the novel’s time period between the 1980s when the former fishing and trade port became an industrial zone and the late-2000’s renewal boom. Probably closer to the 2000s, given the dilapidations Iðunn finds in Grandi.
As if Iðunn doesn’t have enough to worry about, her ex Stefan is trying to renew contact. Iðunn takes a healthy step toward solving that problem by recontacting the princely Mar, who is eager for another date. As soon as her black eye heals, she’s ready for it. She’s also taken sterner measures against night-roaming by padlocking her front door from inside. Good move?
Bad move. She wakes up to a bloody mess of torn fingernails. Night-Iðunn was not amused nor deterred by the precaution. I don’t know that her clawing at the new latch and lock were enough to tear them free, but the consequences of that fury nastily upscaled day-Iðunn’s punishment to match her offense. The “dark between the stars, that empty nowhere, the void” against which Iðunn struggles to defend herself are about to collapse her shields, and she runs half-dressed for the psychiatric help she’s been dodging.
She doesn’t get to see the psychologist her doctor recommended. Hakon, the available therapist, looks “ridiculously young,” but given the story she tells him, and the shape she’s in, the tentative diagnosis isn’t murky. Especially not after she says she no longer thinks she’s sleepwalking. Instead, she thinks it’s “someone else” walking in her body by night.
Hakan wants her to check into the psychiatric ward. He talks to Iðunn about “psychosis.” I bet he’s thinking something much more specific, not “just” an alienation from self, a sense of passively observing one’s actions rather than being their agent. Not “just” dissociative amnesia, recurrent. He seems like a decent guy, but can he help feeling a little excited to have someone like Iðunn in his IKEA-furnished, vanilla-scented office? You don’t see Dissociative Identity Disorder, possession form, every day. Kind of like turning over a rock expecting to see maybe a garter snake, maybe a feisty bull snake at most, and instead staring down at a diamondback rattler. Because whatever might be “possessing” Iðunn is one abusive personality state!
Interesting, if you can turn the rattler over to expert wranglers and write up your session notes, yourself unbitten and the rattler on its way to a good reptile rescue. Anyone want to wager that Iðunn will take this sound bit of professional advice?
Anyone?
Next week, join us for a totally-fake conversation with the other side of the veil, in Nghi Vo’s “What the Dead Know.”[end-mark]
The post For Want of a Fingernail: Hildur Knutsdottir’s <i>The Night Guest</i> (Part 5) appeared first on Reactor.
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