I have three other books that I've been moving through slowly these last two months, but I set them all aside to read the next book for my book club, The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir. I was a little terrified to read it. At McNally Jackson, where I got my copy, it was shelved in the Horror section. The headline on Bookshop.org says, "Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that’s sure to keep you awake at night," and all the blurbs seemed to express a similar feeling. I don't enjoy being scared. My tolerance for horror movies is pretty much nonexistent. I get nightmares. I spent a long time last night in conversation with a friend trying to remember any scary book I had read. For a while, the only thing I could come up with that might fit the horror genre was Frankenstein, but scrolling through my StoryGraph read books I got to China Miéville's The Scar and remembered reading Perdido Street Station, without a doubt the scariest book I've ever read (though I did like it, actually).
So, with a sense of dread, I waited until I had a free day when I could start it in the morning and finish it well before bedtime. As it turned out, it only took about 2 hours to read. It's 194 pages divided into about 100 chapters, several of which are one short sentence long. There's a lot of blank space in this book. Which, now that I think about it, correlates nicely with the story. The Night Guest is narrated by a woman find herself waking up bruised and exhausted each morning after what she believes to have been a full night's sleep, and seeks to uncover the mystery of her nighttime activities. I realized quite early that the horror in The Night Guest is not the kind of horror that scares me. I've given a fair amount of thought to what type of horror most scares me, though I've never quite pinpointed it. Having thought about it a little more today, I can confidently say that I find external horror a lot scarier than internal horror, a distinction I'd never particularly thought about before.
The book I found myself thinking about as I read The Night Guest was Justine, which now that I think about it, is something of a horror (internal horror) novel itself. In fact, Justine left me feeling quite shaken, in a good – or at least a powerful – way. I breezed through The Night Guest. It's a compelling read, if a bit slight. Maybe I should be relieved.
