The Lady or… the Other Lady: Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest (Part 9)
Published on August 20, 2025
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 wrap up Hildur Knutsdottir’s The Night Guest with Chapters 74-100. The English version, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, was first published in 2024; the original was published in 2021. Spoilers ahead!
Two more kittens have disappeared. Iðunn goes to Grandi, but the shed is empty.
* * *
She buys another smart watch and tapes it to her ankle. She wakes in bed the next morning, her watch gone and her ankle lacerated. While shampooing, she feels a massive knot on the back of her head.
She decides to stop sleeping.
The first night, Iðunn stocks up on energy drinks. She watches TV until four a.m. Takes a walk. Does laundry. She arrives at work feeling okay. Stefan glares at her, but she ignores him.
Her second unsleeping night, Iðunn walks home without seeing any cats. Laundry, housecleaning, and a predawn walk keep her awake. She arrives at work early.
She thinks she doesn’t need to sleep. She feels better than she has in months. Maybe she should sell her bed.
* * *
To stay awake the third night, she has to keep walking. At work, Stina tells her she looks awful. Maybe she should buy some stimulants. Too bad she doesn’t know how.
She stays late at the office, watching shark attacks on YouTube. When you stop sleeping, there are so many hours in the day.
* * *
She falls asleep and is awakened by noise in the printer room. It’s Stefan, who says he came up to use the copier, his floor’s machine being broken.
Iðunn walks away, but he follows her. At least this time he doesn’t grab her. He asks if they can talk. Well, at least it might keep her awake.
They go to a pool hall in a downscale neighborhood where Stefan looks out of place. Maybe he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him. Stefan used to pretend he’d leave his wife for Iðunn. She knew he never would, and she didn’t want him to. She only had the affair because she was bored. Stephen was furious when she ended it. He couldn’t handle being rejected; that’s why he’s pursuing her again.
Iðunn allows Stefan to talk her into having some rum in her Coke. At the bar, he fidgets with his wallet for an oddly long time. She sips the Coke, which has a bitter aftertaste. Stefan says the bartender warned him that not everyone likes their new rum. He tastes it, but doesn’t seem to swallow. Not bad, he says.
Needing the caffeine, Iðunn keeps drinking. As Stefan describes how he’s missed her, she begins to feel woozy, numb, tongue-tied. When Stefan hustles her outside, her legs buckle, and he has to drag her along.
She wakes up in her bed. Her hands are covered in blood.
* * *
She’s afraid to call Stefan.
* * *
At work, Stina says she looks better. Iðunn goes to the bathroom to wash her hands for the dozenth time. They’re scrubbed raw, but still smell metallic. Later, Stina tells her the latest office news: Stefan has disappeared!
* * *
She sleeps. Wakes. The day passes.
She sleeps. Wakes. The day passes.
* * *
A woman calls, a police detective who asks her to come to the station. In a shabby office nothing like movie interrogation rooms, the detective asks about Iðunn’s relationship with Stefan. Iðunn says they broke up, but can’t remember exactly how long ago. She’s been sleep deprived lately.
Stefan’s phone records indicate he’s repeatedly called Iðunn lately, the detective notes. Yes, but Iðunn never answered, and at work, she’s avoided him, and no, she doesn’t know where he is. Which is the truth.
The detective thinks nothing’s happened. Sometimes people just disappear. And Stefan was not….
Iðunn doesn’t fill in the blank, and the interview ends.
* * *
She sleeps in the dark. Wakes in the dark. The day passes in the dark.
Linda calls—has Iðunn seen the news? Mar is missing.
* * *
The Grandi shed is empty, but the door of a nearby shipping container hangs ajar, and Iðunn knows. Immediately. Flashlight activated, she walks inside.
First she sees the brooch on the floor, centered in a pebble-spiral. Then she sees Stefan hanging from bound hands in a corner, neck slashed, shirt blood-soaked. She starts backwards, slips on something wet, and falls, hitting her head.
She comes to with a splitting headache. Her flashlight lies nearby, illuminating a pair of men’s shoes. She struggles to sit, then grips the flashlight. It spotlights Mar, his eyes widening with fear. Fear of her. He’s gagged, and his hands are bound. She looks for something to cut him free. Behind her, a familiar voice mutters.
She squats beside the door, face hidden in her hands. Iðunn stares at her emaciated torso and bleached skin, sees her breathing deeply as if asleep. Iðunn kneels in front of her.
She raises her head and looks at Iðunn. Her cheekbones are higher than Iðunn remembers, her lips thicker, her eyes pitch-black. She hands Iðunn a long-bladed knife, and Iðunn knows what to do. She tells Mar it’ll be okay. The knife is sharp. It cuts so gently.
* * *
Outside she and Iðunn stand shoulder to shoulder, exactly the same height. Iðunn hugs her close. She’s often thought what she’d say to her, but says nothing. Instead she lifts her on her back, a nearly weightless burden, and slips through the fence. In the container, Mar stirs. She’s cut his bindings. He must rescue himself now.
They cross an empty street. She wraps cold arms around Iðunn’s neck. Iðunn smells the ocean before she hears it. The beach is rocky, but she grips Iðunn’s neck, and they don’t fall. Iðunn steps down into soft black sand. The kelp is slippery, but Iðunn keeps her balance.
The sea surges up her calf. Her cheek against Iðunn’s is cold as the water. Hips-deep, Iðunn kicks off the bottom. She floats on her back, the other underneath her, their embrace unbroken.
Above, the sky twinkles with stars. Between the stars is the dark.
The Degenerate Dutch: Stefan, grown increasingly obsessed with the one who got away, uses roofies on a sleep-deprived Iðunn. It works, but doesn’t work out well for him.
Madness Takes Its Toll: At some point, increasingly extreme efforts at documentation follow the definition of insanity that involves doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Other definitions may also apply.
Anne’s Commentary
My first thought on finishing Knutsdottir’s novel was: Which is it, the lady or the tiger? But our recent read, Chesya Burke’s “Please, Momma,” better fits that narrative model. Momma finally makes her critical choice, but not in the reader’s “hearing.” As in Frank R. Stockton’s famous short about the man who has to decide which door to open, the one concealing a ferocious beast or the one concealing a beautiful (presumably non-ferocious) woman, Burke’s ending is ambiguous. Each reader must construct their own version, either based on interpretation of the earlier text, or based on whim, biases, or mood. Or they can close the book, whether with a shrug or by launching it into a convenient wall, open fire, sewer drain, or tiger’s maw.
My second thought: But why isn’t The Night Guest an ambiguous ending story? I’m not saying it doesn’t leave us with multiple ambiguities, loose ends, like the never-specified thing that Iðunn finds under Ingunn’s pillow after her death. Iðunn thinks about it right after Mar obliquely asks whether Ingunn might have committed suicide. Was the thing a suicide note of some sort? Or can we combine it with the loose-end brooch Iðunn finds in both the Grandi shed and cargo container, surrounded by spirals of pebbles? The spirals strike me as a magical focus, perhaps meant to capture force and deliver it to the brooch, or as a beacon to draw a particular person to the place. Is the owner of the brooch living or dead? Iðunn or Ingunn?
Excuse me while I claw my way out of this rabbit-hole to answer my second-thought question. Night Guest doesn’t have an ambiguous ending of the lady or tiger sort because we know which is Iðunn’s choice of doors. It’s the one that has her making a last trip to Grandi to confront The Awful Truth lurking there.
It’s true that the climax is packed with ambiguities, but nothing’s uncertain about Stefan’s cause of death—he’s been hung up and slaughtered like a pig, not to insult pigs by comparing them to such an unsympathetic character as Stefan. Unable to exert control over Iðunn any other way, he slips a date-rape drug into her Coke and rum—her symptoms mostly point to Rohypnol, aka roofies, but Stefan’s definitely given her some incapacitating substance. He urges her to add alcohol to her Coke. He spends an inordinate amount of time fumbling around at the bar after receiving her drink. He blames the drink’s bitter taste on a new rum the bartender’s trying, and he only feigns tasting it before declaring it okay. Nor is he surprised when she gets tongue-tied and wobbly, but immediately drags her out of the bar.
What happens after that is what’s left to our imaginations. I imagine Iðunn’s night guest knew what Stefan was up to and welcomed it. With Iðunn knocked into a really deep sleep, the guest might’ve been able to possess her host more powerfully than ever. She might even have been able to manifest for the first time into the physical form Iðunn will meet in the container.
Which brings me to my third thought.
Let’s say Night Guest is more a lady or a crazy kind of narrative. Or make that a lady or a crazy or a trickster/criminal kind of narrative (the three categories aren’t mutually exclusive.) The answer hinges on how reliable a narrator Iðunn is, and to what degree that reliability hinges on her mental state and motivations for telling the story. By “lady,” I’m thinking “lady-in-distress,” an innocent victim of high-level gaslighting or supernatural machinations. By “crazy,” I’m thinking that Iðunn’s psychologist correctly pointed her toward inpatient treatment for possible schizophrenia. By “trickster-criminal,” I’m thinking that Iðunn caused Ingunn’s mysterious death and continues her killing streak with the cats, Stefan, and perhaps others in between. The “crazy” and “criminal” options would believably partner up, leaving Iðunn “innocent” only by reason of insanity.
What would convince me that Iðunn’s the lady-in-distress, targeted for supernatural vengeance by a ghost or demon or (most likely) her dead sister become one of the aforesaid, is this:
We know that Iðunn finally sees (smells, feels) the night-guest in the cargo container. But does Mar see the apparition as well? Had Stefan seen it prior to his death? What about the cats? Were they hissing and running from Iðunn or from what they could discern in her wake? Was Mar so attracted to Iðunn because he unknowingly sensed the actual Ingunn about her? Was he suddenly terrified of Iðunn after her last night in his apartment because the actual Ingunn revealed herself to him?
I gravitate toward supernatural explanations in weird fiction, but I’m up in the aether on this novel. The one thing I strongly believe is that Iðunn is not walking back out of that cold ocean into which she carries her genuine or fever-dreamt night guest.
Overhead, between the stars, is the dark, welcoming her home.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The one potential argument for psychology majors being saner than others is that, when we pull all-nighters in college, we get immediate lectures on the effects of sleep deprivation. Or at least that’s my experience: when I showed up bleary-eyed to a morning class, my professor sent me back to bed with terrifying knowledge (that young adults were definitely meant to know).
Some of this knowledge may help untangle just what the hell is going on in Night Guest’s conclusion. Maybe. So with the caveat that it’s been a long time since college: one night of missed sleep has about the same cognitive effect as being drunk. Memory consolidation happens during REM, so if you were up late studying, you’ll be lucky to remember the material long enough to take the test. You shouldn’t drive or operate heavy machinery, and you definitely shouldn’t make major life choices. Or follow your obsessed ex to a bar where no one knows your name.
Keep missing sleep, and your brain will try really hard to make up the missing dream time via waking hallucinations. Long term, it’s a good way to achieve psychosis.
Of course, none of this is helpful advice if going to sleep results in (1) no sleep, and (2) being replaced by a dead violence-prone sister.
I normally despise “is this supernatural stuff really happening” questions, but I have to wonder: is this supernatural stuff really happening? Or is Iðunn suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder and hallucinations triggered by the trauma of her sister’s death, and exacerbated by chronic sleep deprivation?
The thing about Iðunn is that, extremely consistently, she’s torn between the need to not be Ingunn and the need to be her. She defines herself as non-violent and accommodating, going along with scripts and norms, bored and boring. But she also takes on her sister’s career path, and even one of her sister’s lovers when the opportunity arises. Her parents forget what desires belonged to which daughter; there’s pressure to live for both of them. It could easily lead to doing so more literally. The stars and the darkness between them: is it possible to have, and be, both?
Iðunn resists clinical analysis or treatment beyond sleeping pills, avoids overnight observation that might actually keep her “guest” under control. Avoids witnesses who might confirm—but also might deny—her experiences. Avoids being known.
All of which is compatible with both imagined possession, and the actual supernatural thing itself. And, for that matter, with the psychological dynamics leaving her vulnerable to actual possession. At some level it doesn’t matter. The results—for Iðunn, but also for Stefan and Mar—are pretty much the same. Whether or not she has a real animated corpse on her back as she floats out to sea, the ocean is still there.
And the stars. And the darkness between them.
Next week, we cover George Eliot’s classic novella, “The Lifted Veil,” and explore the perils of extrasensory perception. Then, the following week, we start on our new longread: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster![end-mark]
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