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The Selfie of Horror: Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest (Part 4)
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Reading the Weird
The Selfie of Horror: Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest (Part 4)
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on June 11, 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 22-28 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 stares at the screenshot of herself just before she went back to bed the night before. Her face isn’t dreamy but “vigilant. Focused. As if someone is in power. Someone other than me.” Worse, she recognizes that expression. It’s been a long time, but she’s seen it before.
* * *
The phone videos for the next two nights are the same. On the third night, however, “sleepwalker” Iðunn looks straight into the phone and smiles. Then Iðunn, if this is Iðunn, rises and shuts the closet door. The video stream goes black.
Iðunn rewinds the recording to the smile, “that unbearable, contemptuous smile I thought I would never see again.”
* * *
While shopping at the grocery store, Iðunn gets a call from an unknown number. She lets it go to voicemail. On her way home, she gets another call from that number. The accompanying message is from Mar, the man she met at the bar a few nights before. The man who once had a “relationship” with her sister. He thanks her for talking to him and asks if she’d be willing to meet again.
* * *
Iðunn takes several days to decide to accept Mar’s dinner invitation. It’s been hard for her to think about anything but what’s happening to her every night. Hard as she tries to avoid them, these thoughts seem to fill her head “with a steady bubbling that drowns all other thoughts as fast as they rise out of the morass.”
Maybe Mar could be the “fixed point” to break this cycle. At least, he could be a distraction.
Mar feels he monopolized the conversation the other night, talking about himself and Sis. He invites Iðunn to talk about herself, which she doesn’t like doing. She has imagined that if she says little, people will think she’s mysterious, possessed of “this rich inner life.” Or maybe only men can pull off the still-waters-run-deep trick, whereas women who try it are assumed to be stupid. There’s not much to tell, she says, then supplies a resume-style autobiography.
She’s relieved when Mar picks up the conversational burden, leaving her free to study him. He’s well-dressed, good-looking. He “looks like he lives in this nice, expensive restaurant.” After their meal, he invites her to his place. Iðunn says yes.
* * *
Mar lives in a “chic” high-rise in an exclusive harbor neighborhood. His apartment is new, tastefully decorated, with huge windows overlooking the marina. Iðunn admires the view, including the night-obscured one of Mt. Esja, a “sleeping giant” she knows is out there. When she and Mar embrace before the window, she feels as if they’re performing on a stage.
Living-room foreplay leads to the bedroom and another huge window. Iðunn wants Mar to turn off the lights, so she won’t still feel they’re onstage. He understands. Afterwards, the luxurious bedding and Mar’s enfolding arms tempt her to drift into sleep, but she knows she can’t succumb. She gets up, to Mar’s surprise and apparent hurt. She excuses herself by claiming she needs to get to work early the next day. He doesn’t try to dissuade her.
She kisses him on the forehead before leaving. He smiles “sadly” and asks: “Can we do this again?”
Outside, the whole city seems asleep. Arriving home, the only sign of life she sees is a cat vanishing under a fence.
* * *
Next morning, Iðunn wakes up to find she’s acquired a black eye. Yet she took the precaution of barricading her front door with a heavy dresser! Examining the barricade, she sees the gap between door and dresser is wider than she left it. Someone must have moved it.
Her.
She manages to disguise the black eye under makeup, well enough to go to work.
She can’t escape the feeling that she was punished for blocking the exit from her apartment.
* * *
Where did she go?
The Degenerate Dutch: Iðunn would like to sit silently and be thought a humble, reticent genius. But, she concludes, this technique only works for me – if you’re female, “people assume you’re stupid and have nothing remarkable to say.”
Libronomicon: The Norse Eddas make for a telling literary reference.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Iðunn plays around the edges of self-diagnosis and psych-speak (“Avoidance?”), but still doesn’t want to bring an actual clinical psychologist into the mix.
Anne’s Commentary
Where is it that Iðunn walks at night? By the end of today’s reading, that’s a question she’s asked twice, giving it the emphasis of occupying its own separate chapter. Of the six classic reporter’s questions, she’s come closest to answering “When?” (about every night for a wearisome while) and “How?” (thanks to somnambulism, which explains why she doesn’t remember the “Where?” she visits or the “What?” she does when she gets there.) For “Why?” she’s googled a host of potential causes, from stress and anxiety through sleep disruptions and underlying conditions to genetic makeup.
The remaining reporter’s question, “Who?,” has the only obvious answer. The night walker is Iðunn, of course. Who else wears Iðunn’s body? Even if she were suffering from dissociative identity disorder and exhibiting personality states with different names, the sum total would remain Iðunn. Right?
Right, unless she were willing to consider supernatural explanations, and there’s no reason she should do that just because the somnambulistic Iðunn in her surveillance recording has a vigilant and focused expression she’s seen before. Long ago now. On someone other than herself. Someone in power. Skip forward three nights, when somnambulistic Iðunn smiles right at the closet-cached phone before putting the closet door between her and it.
Not just any smile, mind you. The “unbearable, contemptuous smile” Iðunn thought she’d never see again. The kind of smile, maybe, that a two-years-older sister might have bestowed on her sibling while boasting about her many social and sexual triumphs? All the time knowing that this younger, shyer, drabber sibling could never match her?
About the smiling “Iðunn” in the recording, the in-the-flesh Iðunn at last asks, “if this is me.”
It’s a big step towards the dark. For the next few days, Iðunn feels like “a constant hurricane has been raging in [her] head,” driving out everything except the question of “what’s really been happening to [her] at night.” She’s slammed storm shutters to avoid hearing the wind. Hasn’t worked. Changing metaphors a bit while staying with the foul weather motif, her head “is constantly filled with a steady bubbling that drowns all other thoughts as fast as they rise out of the morass.”
Re-enter Mar. Iðunn was introduced to him way back in Chapter 13 and as far as the text goes, she hasn’t thought about him since. What she has been thinking about between Chapter 13 and Chapter 24 are her Lost Nighttimes. She’s had the brainstorm that sleepwalking’s her problem. That’s led to much googling and worrying. She begs Asdis for sleeping pills. Such is the relief her first night of quiet (stationary) sleep brings that she waxes euphoric. Not even Mavur the cat’s rejection fazes her, not with the promise of a beautiful life modern pharmaceuticals has vouchsafed her. Significantly, Mar isn’t part of her future dreams. Nor does he figure as a potential savior when she starts sleepwalking again, and her sleeping pills vanish, and her surveillance camera captures evidence that she may not be alone inside her own head. At least, not when she’s asleep.
When Mar messages he’d like to meet her again, Iðunn feels no romantic thrill. However, she needs a “fixed point” to navigate her emotional turmoil, and it occurs to her he might serve as that point. Why him? Could it be because she sensed his “kind consideration” was sincere? Because when they said goodbye, there was “a bright green gleam in his eyes”? He’s nice. He’s usable. At worst, dinner with him could be a distraction.
Dinner goes well once Iðunn steers Mar away from asking questions about her, to talking about himself. That gives her a chance to sit silent and “study” him. Her impressions are positive enough for her to accept his invitation to adjourn to his place. The tastefully decorated apartment in a chic harborside high-rise, with Mar pouring champagne and Iðunn poised in a huge window, could pass for a stage set—appropriate given how she feels like she’s acting in a play, she and Mar, tangling in a love scene before an audience.
Not alone at all.
Iðunn has to get offstage and out of the theater before she succumbs to postcoital sleep in Mar’s arms. Her excuse is she has to be at work early. Mar is disappointed that she’s leaving, but he’s “a prince” about not trying to dissuade her. “Can we do this again?” is his last line, underscored by a sad smile. Or not a line, not pretended sadness, because Mar isn’t an actor?
The whole lot of aloneness Iðunn faces on her way home through the sleeping city is punctuated when she turns onto her street and glimpses a cat escaping under a fence. Before going to bed, Iðunn acts to keep herself from escaping (if it’s really her who walks by night) by pushing a heavy dresser across her front door.
She wakes in the morning to find a huge black eye she didn’t have when she went to sleep. The dresser has been moved a couple centimeters from the door she blocked. Who could have wrestled it awry?
Her, Iðunn thinks. The same her who gave Iðunn the black eye by way of punishment for barricading the door.
And I get the impression she doesn’t mean herself, this time.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
“Where did I go?” Even as we’re starting to get answers, I’m increasingly convinced that that’s not a simple question. There’s the obvious surface-level question: where does Iðunn’s body go each night? But there’s also her mind: where does she go, when the Guest comes out?
And then there’s the question that goes beyond the present moment. Iðunn thinks of herself as so tightly controlled, but she also thinks of herself as hollow. Silent not because she’s mysterious and self-confident, but silent because she has nothing to say. But also because she’s frightened of questions that might dig down to some inner self as little in need of pity as… Loki??? Who is this bound self, powerful and dangerous and all-defeatingly clever? Where did this Iðunn go—and when?
The expression that Iðunn recognizes in the recording is, almost certainly, her sister of late and complex memory. The one whose death relieved and then constrained her. The one against whom she never hit back. The one who dabbled with hearts, whispered to Iðunn about her exploits, and didn’t remember Mar’s name. Iðunn remembers Mar’s name, and is willing to take her sister’s place in his bed.
If Iðunn’s body is her sister’s at night, that opens so many possibilities. Perhaps sister’s soul has been quiescent in her depths for years, until it/she gained the ability to rise and take control. Or maybe something even stranger is going on. There are stories where a single person is split into self-control and passion, good and wicked, or whatever other duality appealed to some passing witch. Kill one, and the results are likely to be… odd. And there are other stories where identical or near-identical siblings are switched, not at birth but at death—one dying and the survivor taking on their identity. Could hollow-feeling Iðunn be a mask that the sister wears, and original Iðunn be the one who actually died?
But some sort of duality is real here—at the very least, the Guest treats Iðunn as an enemy, or just as a little sister who deserves to be punished if she doesn’t give the Guest her way.
About that titular term: why guest? Aren’t guests usually invited? If this one was, then how and when? Something else Iðunn doesn’t know, remember, or admit. Given her avoidance of unpleasant topics, it’s still a possibility. The book isn’t called The Night Invader after all, or The Night Body-Snatcher. And, too, there’s the question of whether some family actually needs to be invited, or whether those close enough can claim the right to drop by any time. Many people have parents, or siblings or grandparents or third cousins twice-removed, who assume that when they show up, all previous obligations will be dropped to ensure their meals prepared and pillows fluffed. Iðunn’s sister sounds like just the type.
Back to Loki: Norse culture centers hospitality as an absolute requirement, but also places certain obligations on visitors. Those obligations are certainly being violated here, but many a tale is built on the edge cases for those rules. Iðunn accepts Mar’s invitation, but makes sure he doesn’t get any guest that he didn’t invite. Is that, along with the dresser, one of the provocations so resented by the Guest later?
Loki is also a sibling: blood brother to Odin. Sibling, and then enemy. Odin binds Loki, leaving him in torment as the ice-and-fire giant under the mountain—until Ragnarök, when he’ll escape to rain destruction. Suppose the blood bond let him escape in small ways before then, taking advantage of Odin’s relative freedom?
Who is Iðunn? And where does she go?
Next week, join us for a lovely summer trip to Cape Cod in Paul Tremblay’s “In Bloom.” It’s available in Kindle e-book only, sorry, but we couldn’t resist the algae.[end-mark]
The post The Selfie of Horror: Hildur Knutsdottir’s <i>The Night Guest</i> (Part 4) appeared first on Reactor.
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