At yet another doctor’s office, Iðunn can’t seem to find out what’s wrong. Constant fatigue is just one of the major symptoms, definitely a sign something’s not right. The doctors only dismiss her, with blood tests revealing nothing.
Friends and family give her the same refrain: better diet, more exercise, trying out a special nighttime routine? She follows their advice, also buying sleeping pills, vitamins and a step-counting watch, all to no avail.
Then one night Iðunn falls asleep wearing the watch, and upon waking learns she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . .
What is happening when she’s asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won’t anyone believe her?
Why we’re excited about this book:
Celebrated in Iceland, Hildur Knútsdóttir is about to be very well-known to horror readers the world over. The author of Mandla, Hrím, Urðarhvarf, Spádómurinn, Ljónið, Nornin, and Skógurinn, and in 2016, won the Icelandic Literary Prize for children’s books for her novel Vetrarhörkur. With her latest, Knútsdóttir presents the eerie story of a young woman suffering from a strange ailment, unable to recall events after she falls asleep. CJ Leede (Maeve Fly) says: “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.”, Andy Davidson (In the Valley of the Sun) says: “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.”, and Clay McLeod Chapman (What Kind of Mother) says: “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.”
Releasing from Tor Nightfire 3 September 2024, The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir (translated by Mary Robinette Kowal) is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA