The Night House by Jo Nesbo

Started: 24.12.25

Finished: 26.12.25

Paperback

Part One is about a boy called Richard, who witnesses his friend Tom get eaten by a payphone. Then another friend, Jack, metamorphoses into a cicada. Richard believes that a man called Imu Jonasson is behind all this.

Part Two occurs 15 years later, when Richard attends a class reunion. It turns out that he writes children's books, and the events that happened to Tom and Jack were just part of a story. They were real people from school though, and they are at the reunion, along with several other classmates who also featured in his novel. When the reunion party moves back to the house of Oscar, Richard finds himself being hunted down by all his former classmates who want to kill him because of how much he bullied them at school.

In Part Three, Richard has actually been living in a psychiatric asylum for the past 15 years, after his father killed his mother in an arson attack on their ninth floor apartment. His father fell from the window and also died. Richard is receiving ECT to try and erase the memories of the fire. Once again, the various people that he encounters in the asylum have the same names as the people who featured as classmates in his novel The Night House, which his therapist encourages him to start writing. So it kind of all comes full circle. 

The plot reminded me very much of the film Ghost Stories, where a man with locked-in syndrome imagines an entirely different life for himself based on the people and objects in his hospital room.