We have been used, for several years, to watch in his detective novels Hugh Nesbo bloody family and social conflicts or complicated thrillers about the primaries of power, where and, suddenly, his conversation with Shakespeare’s tragedies. However, with Nesbo’s new novel, which has just been released under the title “To nychtospito”, translated by Grigoris Kondylis, from Metaichmio, a new writing path opens.

Road where Nesbo will encounter “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (see also the apt remarks of Gr. Kondylis in his introductory note), but also the dark world of Stephen King, which probably also sets the dominant tone, at least in what has to do with the first chapter of the book.

If we follow the sequence of influences or sources that Nesbo receives or works with, we will immediately find the thematic connections and sequences.

First are the creepy outgrowths: houses that sprout roots, people that turn into insects, telephone booth headsets that devour human limbs.

Then there are the ever-anxious teenagers, ready to rebel or self-destruct, set in a geographically undefined small town in the US (remember Nesbo is Norwegian), called Balladine, who raises her children in an extremely fearful way, in a time when which is none other than the 1970s.

King’s shadow grows larger as the action unfolds and weighs heavily on both the author and his young protagonists. King’s otherworldly anthropo-geography, his metaphysical inferences and the omnipresence of Evil, lurking to destroy the just and the unjust, run rampant in “Night House” with many allegorical allusions to friendship or the acceptance of self by others, as and with dozens of unexplained secrets. Let’s add spells, white and black magic or fires that burn everything without any warning and without the slightest reason.

Just as King often proves to be a master of words, gaining our interest, our attention not only thanks to the eerie atmosphere of his books, but also because of the multi-layered operation of their writing, so Nesbo does not take long to surprise us with the multiple shots and the different versions of his own story.

Because if in the first chapter, “Night House” reveals the strange things that threaten and ultimately shock the teenagers of Balladine, in the second and third chapters two capital reversals will follow, where both the time and places of the action as well as the perspective of the narrative will change drastically.

Speaking of horror novels (the same is true of detective novels), it is unpleasant to dwell on crucial details or to talk wildly about myth and plot because then the reader is deprived of the pleasure of suspense and the charm of the unexpected. I can, nevertheless, without violating the previous limitations, say that the strong impressions left by the first chapter of “Night House” are equally strong in the two following ones.

In the second chapter, what we know from the first will develop into something that looks like a reverse mirage or a dream journey inside another dream. To move, in the third chapter, to the sterile environment of medicine and medical exhibitions.

And here is Nesbo’s artistic skill and his ability to transform the very fabric of his writing. How; But, by moving from the fictional milieu of the fantastic, the metaphysical and the horror to a universe where a series of obscured and incomprehensible double or triple figures alternate with dreamlike and transcendent paths until we arrive at a realism of psychoanalytical cruelty and precision through the whose fantasy, horror and supernatural will be permanently bracketed – and won’t claim multiple times our attention.