Book 12 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! I’ve basically rallied and caught myself up. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Social media is a really good place to encounter authors and works that are new to you! Recently, I came across Hildur Knútsdóttir’s book The Night Guest (2025) through her Bluesky account and was intrigued to read a horror story set in Reykjavík, Iceland and written by an Icelandic author!

And I’m glad I did! The Night Guest is a short and fast-paced novel that manages to build up an incredibly amount of dread over its 224 pages.

Iðunn suffers from constant fatigue, and no doctors seem to be able to give her an answer as to what is wrong with her. Her blood tests and medical exams show nothing unusual, and some even dismiss her symptoms. Iðunn’s friends and family suggest she try eating better and getting into a healthier daily routine, and she is desperate enough to try anything. She even buys herself a fitness tracking watch to make sure she is getting in enough steps every day, but even those changes do not reduce her exhaustion or the appearance of strange bruises some mornings.

Then one night she forgets to take the watch off before bed, and is shocked the next morning to find that she’s walked over 40,000 steps overnight. While she was supposedly asleep. Where did she walk, and what was she doing? Her attempts to find out and to stop her nightly excursions will have consequences…

The Night Guest is a short, quick-paced novel. We are dropped right into Iðunn’s problems and her attempts to resolve them and only learn more of her history and backstory along the way. I found the pace utterly compelling, and I read the entire book in a single afternoon! It is in fact shorter than it seems, because Knútsdóttir uses negative space to enhance the building dread and capture the growing panic of Iðunn as she realizes that her situation is even more dire than it first seemed. By “negative space” I mean some pages that are largely empty except for key statements and questions that are strongly emphasized by their isolation.

The book builds to a chilling conclusion, but like many great horror novels it leaves just as many questions as it provides answers. By the end, you will have an idea of what has happened, but be left feeling like you still do not have the full picture, and those unanswered questions will linger with you.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Night Guest and look forward to checking out more of Knútsdóttir’s writing in the future!

(Short note: there is some animal-directed violence mentioned in the novel, for those sensitive to such things.)