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Googling Up the Wrong Tree: Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest (Part 1)
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Googling Up the Wrong Tree: Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest (Part 1)
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on April 30, 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 1-7 of Hildur Knútsdóttir’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!
Reykjavik resident Iðunn has replaced the “old, gray-haired prick” of a doctor assigned by her health center with a woman ten years younger than herself. Asdis is still a resident, but very thorough—unlike the prick, she won’t let some horrific rare ailment slip by her. Iðunn has been combing the internet for information on every disease that could be causing her extreme and lingering exhaustion. She wakes up every morning feeling as if she was on a rampage the night before. Every part of her is tired, sore. Even her jaw.
Asdis asks the usual questions. Has the tiredness been going on a while? (Yes.) Has Iðunn recently had a cold or flu? (No.) Has she been under stress lately? (Well, Stefan hissed that she was a bitch before slamming the door in her face. But blaming him for her malaise would give him too much credit.) What are Iðunn’s concerns? (That she has myasthenia gravis, or ALS.) Or maybe leukemia—look at this bruise that showed up overnight. Asdis looks. She doubts Iðunn has leukemia or any other serious condition, but she’ll add a white blood cell count to Iðunn’s lab order.
Asdis is going to be a wonderful doctor. Absurdly, Iðunn feels a mother’s pride.
The blood tests come out normal. The news brings tears to Iðunn’s eyes, and she retreats to her workplace restroom. It isn’t that she wants a horrible disease. But there’s nothing worse with having unexplained symptoms that can’t be pinned down, so that doctors think the problem’s all in your head. Iðunn tells her reflection that she should be happy, and is surprised by the reflection’s malicious grin.
Over drinks, Iðunn’s friends recommend exercise, yoga, getting off her vegetarian diet, walking more. One notices a bruise on Iðunn’s chest; another asks if Stefan made it. No, Iðunn answers with a laugh.
As happy hour draws to a close, Iðunn notices a well-dressed man staring at her “like he’s seen a ghost.” Before she can figure out whether to smile or ignore him, he joins a group of similarly well-dressed men.
Iðunn buys an expensive watch with “the most accurate pedometer on the market,” plus GPS. She asks if the watch would be easy for someone to hack. The clerk assures her that she can set up the watch however she sees fit. When she gets home, Iðunn turns off all the watch’s features except the pedometer and sets it on her bedside table.
Iðunn wakes up not only tired, but with joints that feel as stiff as if stuffed with sand. It isn’t pain she feels but something in between pain and non-pain. Sometimes she takes painkillers, but they don’t work. It seems unfair that she’s not one of the lucky people who experience the placebo effect, just as it’s unfair that she loves cats but is allergic to them. Drinking coffee doesn’t work. Giving up caffeine doesn’t work.
Her daily walk to work and back is 9568 steps. A coworker tells her she could use her phone as a pedometer, but the phone count comes in about a hundred steps less than the watch count. To justify what she spent on it, Iðunn decides to use the watch pedometer.
Another morning, and she wakes up with the taste of blood in her mouth. The mirror reveals a red spot on her chin, but she can’t find any sores on lips, tongue or gums. Her jaw aches like she chomped on something all night, the pain stretching from her jaw to her cheekbones to the back of her skull “like a giant claw.”
A week passes, during which she walks 10,000 steps a day. According to the walk-recommending friend, she should be bursting with energy. Instead she’s more tired than ever.
She books another appointment with Asdis.
The Degenerate Dutch: Iðunn’s first doctor, she suspects, attributes women’s unexplained symptoms to the old catchall of hysteria. She’s well aware of the dearth of research on the female body.
Madness Takes Its Toll: If you can’t diagnose the problem, it must be all in your head.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Chronic fatigue is more than sufficient horror, isn’t it? One hardly needs to add in unsympathetic doctors, let alone mysterious bloodstains.
For the first seven chapters, The Night Guest might easily be mimetic fiction. At the same time, as anyone who deals with it can tell you, undiagnosed chronic illness already sits outside the bounds of reality that many people prefer to acknowledge. Surely modern medicine has all the answers—or if not, there’s a secret solution that doctors don’t want you to know. Little known fact: the Necronomicon is actually a yoga manual.
Iðunn spends a lot of time navigating those blurry boundaries of what to believe. She’s in the awkward position of having both legitimate and illegitimate paranoias. There really are many doctors who would rather dismiss a hard-to-solve complaint than admit they don’t know everything, who are arrogant and sexist. And it really is easy to come to the most terrifying conclusions about what symptoms might mean, even without random websearches. But her narration is also full of “someone told me” and “I read somewhere” and a lack of either resources or critical thinking skills to follow up. How would she tell the difference between claims that medical research is biased toward the male body (true and well-documented), and claims that electronic ID numbers are “just a plot to force all Icelanders into a monopoly with a cousin of” some higher-up in… well, she can’t remember which party, but it sounds plausible, right? Her phone suffers from spyware, like everyone’s, but she has no sense of how to set and maintain risk levels. The pharmacist recommends spirulina, so she buys it, but the internet says it’s full of heavy metals, so she throws it out.
And her friends are no help—I’m reminded of the Ladies Who Lunch from Company, all shallow relationships and shallow advice, at least in the protagonist’s not-always-reliable head. Exercise, yoga, essential oils. Cut caffeine, add meat. Any off-script statement gets an embarrassed look and dismissal (at least in the protagonist’s not-always-reliable head).
What’s actually going on, under this tumultuous and exhausting surface? Anne recommended this one; I’m coming to it fresh and sans spoilers. A “night guest” could be a literal supernatural intruder, or some possessing entity, or a secret aspect of Narrator’s own body. I’m leaning toward the latter. Visiting vampires leave stains on your neck or chest, not your chin. And incubi can tire you out for sure, but leave stains… elsewhere. (We haven’t reviewed the relevant Kyle Murchison Booth story, but that’s what I’m thinking of here.)
But her jaws ache, and she tells her friends so firmly that humans don’t have canines—wouldn’t spending fugue states on the hunt be ironic for a vegetarian? Shapeshifting must strain your bones and muscles. Especially your jaw muscles. Chomping on what, exactly, all night?
If she forgets to take that watch off some evening, I’m betting it’ll show some interesting numbers in the morning.
Anne’s Commentary
Knútsdóttir lured me irresistibly to her novel with its title. In the lore and fiction of the weird, creatures who visit by night are seldom without questionable motives—otherwise, they’d come around by the light of day, when their hosts weren’t visually compromised or, worse, defenseless in sleep. Wondering whether there were any particular “night guests” in Icelandic legend, I emulated her protagonist Iðunn and “googled” the question.
The overall top results concerned “the Yule Lads,” thirteen spirits who visit human homes during the thirteen nights before Christmas. Each has his favorite way of causing trouble, for which he’s named. There’s Sheepcote Clod, who sucks the milk from sheep, and Gully Gawk, who goes after cow’s milk when he’s not lurking in ravines. Then there are such self-explanatory imps as Pot Scraper, Door Slammer, Window Peeper, Sausage Swiper, and Skyr (yogurt) Gobbler. Over time, the Lads have taken to just leaving little presents in good children’s shoes, or coal or rotten potatoes in the bad kids’ Keds. I hunted in vain for a Yule Lad who siphons the energy out of sleeping damsels, or who inflicts on them bruising blows and morning soreness.
The Lads’ mom, the troll or ogress Gryla, is a much scarier night visitor who roams around stuffing naughty kids in a giant sack, to be processed back at her cave into naughty-kid stew. But at a decade or so older than her new doctor, Iðunn doesn’t qualify as Gryla-fodder, nor is ex Stefan’s parting evaluation of her as a “bitch” proof she’s naughty.
Other night visitors or guests in Icelandic folklore are the usual suspects: the Huldufolk or Hidden People (fairies, elves), nature spirits, ghosts, zombies, poltergeists.
Iðunn’s “night guest” doesn’t need to be any of these. It could be sleep apnea, for all we or Dr. Asdis know. Or Iðunn could be sleep-walking herself to exhaustion. As for her other prominent symptom, the sore jaw, that could be caused by nocturnal teeth grinding, or a sleep-related eating disorder (SRED.) Because, yes, you can binge while asleep and wake up not remembering how that well-gnawed chicken skeleton got into bed with you, along with the rotisserie clamshell, let’s hope, and not a mess of bloody feathers…
The first seven chapters of Night Guest give scant background information about Iðunn, which is to be expected given Knútsdóttir’s decision to drop us readers into the protagonist’s head very much in media res; her use of the present tense emphasizes this immediacy of connection. Suffice it for us to know what Iðunn’s problem is. She’s seeking a second opinion on her chronic exhaustion because the first doctor (male, old) dismissed her to “take it easy” like a good hysterical woman/hypochondriac subtype. Excuse her, but Iðunn is a perfectly sane product of the Age of Information-slash-Anxiety. Who can help being concerned—even, okay, anxious—about one’s symptoms when the internet dishes up so many possible diagnoses for each one? And so many dire prognoses.
Iðunn has also learned enough to worry about whether her new watch can be hacked, but not enough to realize she can use her phone just as readily. She’s accumulated enough odd bits of justification for vegetarianism to confound her friends with sudden pronouncements like the fact that humans don’t have true canines. Because, you know, carnivores all have canines.
As someone who’s also given to blurting out fascinating tidbits over which her audience falls silent, I identify here with Iðunn. I prefer, however, to think it’s the others in the group who are the aliens, not me. To firmly believe that, for example, everyone should want to know about varanid phylogeny with reference to Zumba, that’s the way to avoid social anxieties like Iðunn’s.
Maybe she should come to happy hour with me.
Next week, we belatedly wrap up our National Poetry Month celebration with three odes to haunted ecosystems:
Sonya Taaffe’s “Amitruq Nekya”
Lora Gray’s “How To Haunt a Northern Lake”
Portia Yu’s “Little Haunted House”
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The post Googling Up the Wrong Tree: Hildur Knútsdóttir’s <i>The Night Guest</i> (Part 1) appeared first on Reactor.
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