Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work elevates and flattens time at once. His novels constitute a sprawl that combines a true-to-life and self-centered focus on minutiae with an epic celebration of life itself. The reader of his books becomes aware of the malleability of time: each moment we live through is technically of the same importance. We are as alive in the moment we’re cleaning spilled coffee grounds as we are when first falling in love. It’s just that in telling the story of a life, we assign meaning, defiant of the indifference of time itself. As such, Knausgaard’s work is an interrogation of contentment, questioning how one can be present, can be soulful, within a brain that is anxious, ambitious and observational. Also, there’s a lot of talk about alternative rock and trying to get laid.

Knausgaard is best known for his six-book series, My Struggle, an autobiographical look at the examined life of a writer. It is as monumental and gorgeous and contradictory as its reputation—both hyper-focused and rambling—a meditation on time and memory that represents a justification for contemporary myopia on the self. Knausgaard gives shape to his free-flowing writing, in part, by structuring his ideas in series. There was the “seasons quartet,” four books (one for each season) written to his unborn daughter, published from 2015 to 2016. Beginning in 2020, he began publishing a new suite of novels called The Morning Star, which—we’ve just learned—will conclude at book six. The School of Night, recently published with Penguin Press, is the fourth novel in this set of supernatural, horrifying, anxious, and ruminative books.

The Morning Star series has an enviably simple yet enticing premise: one day, a new star appears in the sky. It lurks near the earth, too close to ignore, too arbitrary to explain. The appearance of the star sets off clusters of strangenesses that most of the novel’s many characters fail to fully consider, being too preoccupied by their own mundane narratives. Hundreds of crabs showing up unexpectedly on a backroad, or the apparent rebirth of a murdered cat, are overshadowed by anxieties about infidelity or soccer. Even as humanity’s understanding of its place in the world, of life and death itself, is thrown askew, most of Knausgaard’s characters can only manage to look at their feet. It’s not difficult to draw a line from this kind of kitchen-sink realism to an obvious climate apocalypse parable, but The Morning Star books never feel like a lecture about how we’re all pretending everything is the fine as our planet dies around us. Part of why the novels work so well—what makes them fun, you might even say—is that the scope of The Morning Star books gives them the feel of an epic fantasy series. We carousel through POV switches. We are left with cliffhanger after tantalizing cliffhanger. There is actual, honest-to-god plot: satanic murders and nuclear fallout and, in the case of The School of Night, a Faustian pact with the Devil.

All Knausgaard’s books are brisk, addictive reads. I’ve consumed each of the lengthy novels in the Morning Star series in just three or four days. They’re clingy. Despite their heft, I’ve found myself carrying them around with me to bars or parks, eager to ignore the world around me. Much of that is because Knausgaard’s concerns, at least in Martin Aitken’s idiosyncratic translations, are less focused on florid writing than on interiority, character, plot, and imagery. The novel is littered with idioms and sayings, delivered to us in a particularly British translation, which would likely steer me from to distraction to frustration in just about any other book.

The School of Night takes us back to the mid-80s, long before the appearance of the Morning Star. The novel sticks exclusively to the perspective of Kristian Hadeland, a character who has appeared only on the periphery of the other novels as a semi-charming shade who seemingly exists in the liminal space between life and death.

While I would advocate for reading these books in order, The School of Night is the first that feels detached enough that one could jump in without knowing the story of the other novels in the series. It has the potential to be the “gateway” book for those hesitant about the more supernatural themes of the first three in the series, or those who are, fairly, intimidated by the raw page count of The Morning Star series. But rather than being parenthetical, the novel’s contained story embodies the spirit of the others while clarifying and emphasizing the series’ themes. This makes The School of Night not only the most accomplished of the series so far, but one of Knausgaard’s finest works in general.

One element that elevates The School of Night is its design. Its framing device sees an older Kristian alone in a cabin, confessing the story of his life to the page. After he’s done, he plans to kill himself. This creates suspense: not only is there the ticking clock, where each word read is a countdown to Kristian’s death, there is an implied mystery. What could this man have done, or experienced, that was so foul that he wants to take his own life?

The narrative begins with Kristian as a young man. He’s left behind plain-old Norway for art school in London as he ruthlessly attempts to become a famous photographer. Knausgaard is often consumed by adolescent stories and what it means to be both coming-of-age as a person, and an artist, finding charm in the insecurity of potential. But Kristian is a particularly wicked creation. He lacks much of the self-effacement that makes Knausgaard’s other young, Nordic men (like Syvert in The Wolves of Eternity or Knausgaard himself in My Struggle) appealing.

An uninhibited moment of frustration leads Kristian to a lightning-flash of violence, trapping him in a legal and moral bind that could undo him. The guilt that follows is moderate but the anxiety of being discovered is all-consuming. If he’s discovered and sent to prison, how can he become one of the great photographers?

This pivotal moment is where the novel becomes, in a more formal sense, both an interpretation and adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Kristian has never read Marlowe—another moment of relatability; I haven’t either—but becomes interested in the playwright after getting involved with a strange 1980s-goth experimental theater troupe producing an adaptation of Marlowe’s infamous play. Kristian is introduced to the theater troupe, and Marlowe in turn, by the beguiling Hans.

Hans, a Dutch artist obsessed with early machine learning—don’t worry, this isn’t an AI novel—is both everywhere and nowhere. He appears conveniently, or, perhaps, as some more obviously satanic version of himself, inconveniently, throughout London as Kristian shifts around, trying to take photos that are worthy of vaulting ambitions.

When the police inevitably capture Kristian after a drawn-out pursuit, Hans appears as if out of thin air and bails Kristian out of jail. As a testament to the novel’s perverse sense of humor, Hans greets Kristian casually outside of the police station, feeding pigeons and munching on a loaf of bread, before quickly descending into the uncanny. “He threw back his head and stared into the sky, the orbs of his sockets rolled white. Three times in quick succession his mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.” Then Kristian and Hans walk away from the police station, seemingly above the law. Kristian escapes punishment for his sins, but that reprieve can only be temporary. This is the most blatantly Marlowe-y moment of the book: it’s not so much a question of if Kristian will sell his soul, but when he will do so.

Knausgaard is deeply interested in the idea that artmaking itself is a devil’s bargain. The My Struggle series is both a self-effacing confession of intimate thoughts and a pimping out of his family’s secrets for the sake of storytelling. In The School of Night, the author indicates that every artistic medium requires an act of betrayal—that artmaking demands trading one’s soul for a shot at eternal life.

As Kristian artistic career advances, he becomes fixated on death, the afterlife, and the dark powers he senses lurking at the end times. Whether he’s taking photos of the skeleton of a dead cat he’s boiled or his fixating on the phantasmagorical devil that may or may not be visible in the first daguerreotype in history, he’s interested in images that gesture to the underside of everyday life. When Kristian finally receives the affirming feedback he has craved from an artist he respects, the critique reads, “I get the feeling you’re photographing the last day. You understand what I mean? These trees, they look like they’re being seen for the last time.”

Where Kristian’s dark artistry dovetails with the protagonist of the My Struggle series is through the character of Liv, Kristian’s sister, who overdoses on Christmas early in the book. In a family that talks through or past each other, Kristian’s way of staving off his worry and frustration while she’s rushed to the hospital is to take photographs of her absence: the rumpled bed in her childhood bedroom, the uncleared Christmas dinner. While the rest of the family is away looking after her, Kristian recognizes the artistic potential of using this tragedy for personal gain. These photos become part of a new artistic phase for Kristian, an obsession with absence that is fruitful professionally and emptying spiritually. “I went out, not bothering to put on a coat, and walked into the field, from where the house stood with all its windows lit up and empty, in the snow, beneath an ink-black sky. I photographed it from various angles, then fetched my old tripod and used that, shivering with cold, before going back inside, placing the camera on the dining table, activating the self-timer and going over to stand by the kitchen door. Hopefully, I’d be little more than a blurry, shadow-like figure.”

“Knausgaard is deeply interested in the idea that artmaking itself is a devil’s bargain. The My Struggle series is both a self-effacing confession of intimate thoughts and a pimping out of his family’s secrets for the sake of storytelling. In The School of Night, the author indicates that every artistic medium requires an act of betrayal—that artmaking demands trading one’s soul for a shot at eternal life.” 

Death and photography form a strangely dispassionate duo in The School of Night—Kristian’s photography focuses on the phantoms that linger at the edges of death. Be it the dead cat he boils—a different dead cat than the one mentioned before, for the record—in order to take pictures of its skeleton, or his hyper-fixation on the phantasmagorical devil that may or may not be visible first daguerreotype in history, the images he creates and that he is interested in must always gesture at something else: he cannot accept the world on its own terms. When Kristian finally receives the affirming feedback he has craved from an artist he respects, the critique reads, ‘’I get the feeling you’re photographing the last day. You understand what I mean? These trees, they look like they’re being seen for the last time.’”

Does the world exist mostly to be refashioned into photography or a three-thousand-page book series? It’s a guaranteed way to be in and out of time, to deny presence itself. The mind split between the first and third person, always watching a life from inside and outside to see what can be taken. It’s an artist’s cliché that any part of life’s agony can be repurposed as “good material.” More often than not, it’s offered as solace: pain can be salvaged and repurposed, or, this too shall pass, and when it does, it will become art. But is that true?