Tor are clearly pushing Hildur Knútsdóttir at the moment, as 'The Night Guest' only came out last December but this is following in its footsteps only five months later. Both are novellas from their Nightfire imprint that generally sit within the increasingly broad horror genre, though this one is much more grounded in its horror than its predecessor. Of course, she's not churning these books out right now; that's more on Mary Robinette Kowal's speed of translation. 'The Night Guest' was a 2021 novella in Iceland, as 'Myrkrið Milli Stjarnanna', and 'Dead Weight' last year, as 'Gestir'.

It kicks off with a tasty prologue, all about how the as-yet-unnamed narrator falls asleep thinking of ways to dispose of human bodies. How do you try to sleep? Well, this isn't just theory, it seems. Unnur is a young business analyst who's suddenly faced with this dark reality and the story that's on its way is going to bring us up to speed with why. Unlike 'The Night Guest', there isn't any kind of supernatural explanation for this; it's given a very real grounding that plays out rather simply and inevitably, once we realise what's going on. It's not complex enough to count as Nordic noir, but it plays in the same ballpark. It's more about the characters of the women involved.

There are two of them, Unnar being the first. She lives in Reykjavík and works right in the heart of the financial centre. Knútsdóttir points out that she has soft hands. She's used to a relatively calm and peaceful life, though there's clearly something going on with her and her boyfriend Jói, who's sometimes completely there for her and sometimes completely not. The other is Ásta, who comes into the picture relatively quickly once Unnar starts trying to figure out who owns the cat who has a sudden penchant for sneaking her way into her apartment and curling up on her bed. According to Ásta, she's Io and she's been missing for two days, possibly because she isn't at all fond of Raggi, her owner's boyfriend.

While this is an easy way for the two to meet, Io conspires to ensure that keeps happening. While Unnar happily gives Io back to Ásta, she finds the cat back inside her apartment the next day and this time she's nursing a newborn kitten. Ásta suggests that it would be too dangerous to try and move them at this stage, so Unnar finds herself stuck with a cat and a kitten for a couple of weeks with Ásta popping round whenever she can with food and litter and attention. It would be unfair, not to mention clichéd, to suggest that they become fast friends but they do connect and they're brought into a deeper connection by circumstances.

I can't really say much more than that, because this is a short read, only a hundred and fifty pages and that misleadingly because, as with 'The Night Guest', Knútsdóttir wrote it in tiny chapters. It doesn't initially seem like they're as tiny here, because they lean long during the early stages, or what passes for long to Knútsdóttir. There are five pages to chapter one, six for chapter four and a sprawling nine for chapter six. However, there are forty-three of them, all told, right down to an impeccably succinct chapter twenty-three, which is over and done in a mere four words. That does lend the book a lot of whitespace, even if it's not remotely as overt as Josh Malerman's 'Incidents Around the House'.

All I'll say is that both these women have a vision of where their lives are when they meet. They're perhaps comfortable within that vision and perhaps not, but it's where they are right now and it's enough. They accept their place in the world with all the positive and negative that it brings. That doesn't seem like much of a bedrock to connect them, but the cat plays its part and they each find questions in each other that reflect back onto themselves. After all, if Unnar wonders about what Ásta is dealing with and vice versa, then it seems only fair that they at least start to reevaluate a little of their own situation. I'm being very careful here to avoid spoilers, but I can't say that I was particularly surprised when the inevitable escalation came.

I liked this more than 'The Night Guest', though it's a lot more straightforward. Where I wanted a bit more than Knútsdóttir was willing to put into that one, it wouldn't be viable to do that in this. It's just the right length if it's going to remain as clear as it is. The only way it could be any longer is if the point would be obscured in some way, and I heartily agree with Knútsdóttir's resistance to that approach. The only thing obscuring what's happening here is the lead characters' willingness to not see through it entirely for the sake of security or convenience. They're not useless women. They're just accepting until they're not and then we have a story.

I hope this proves successful, because that's two novellas that work for me in completely different ways. Sure, they both have female leads who live in Iceland and both involve cats, something that looks to be commonplace in Knútsdóttir's work, but they're thoroughly different otherwise. I like what I see of her other titles, after throwing their Icelandic synopses into Google Translate. I hope that Mary Robinette Kowal will be continuing to exercise her translation muscles to bring them a worthy English language publication too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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