A woman who fears she is suffering from an undiagnosed chronic illness gradually realizes she's facing a far more mysterious horror in The Night Guest, Hildur Knútsdóttir's startling English-language debut, translated from the Icelandic in spare prose by Hugo Award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal.
Iðunn has been experiencing debilitating fatigue and unexplained bruises. She falls asleep and even sleeps through the night, but in the morning when she wakes up, she feels as if she has been performing difficult labor. Her initial attempts to get medical help make her feel as if the doctors believe it's all in her head, and even when she seeks out a younger female doctor who is willing to examine more possibilities, her test results show nothing abnormal. She turns to diet and exercise solutions, but one night she falls asleep with her fitness-tracker watch on and finds an additional 40,000 steps recorded overnight.
In an intimate first-person narration that pulls readers in with humanizing asides, The Night Guest cloaks its audience in the same fog of uncertainty that envelops Iðunn. With its brief page count and short chapters, every line and line break are used for maximum power. An eerie, disorienting effect pervades as Iðunn's life and relationships unravel and hints of what she is doing at night slowly build, leading to a horrifying climax. Those readers who enjoyed I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid or Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke should snatch this up. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library