Christi Nogle

Christi Nogle is the author of the Shirley Jackson Award nominated and Bram Stoker Award® winning first novel Beulah and three short fiction collections, the Stoker-nominated The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future; Promise: A Collection of Weird Science Fiction; and One Eye Opened in That Other Place. Her work has also appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine. She is co-editor with Willow Dawn Becker of the anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror and co-editor with Ai Jiang of Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia. Praise for The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future: “Just as you think you have a handle on what a Christi Nogle story might be, you turn a page and are surprised anew. Enigmatic, surreal yet shockingly visceral, often rooted in a deceptively familiar domesticity turned nightmarish, these strange and unsettling tales unfold in lyrical prose that belies their savagery. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is a haunting and memorable debut.” --Lynda E. Rucker, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Moon Will Look Strange and You'll Know When You Get There "An astonishingly original collection of dark tales - mysterious, haunting, challenging and disturbing, written in crystalline prose as compressed as poetry. Read and then reread and be doubly rewarded!" -- Ramsey Campbell, author of Fellstones "Without a doubt, Christi Nogle is one of my favorite new voices in horror. Her fiction is by turns devastating, horrifying, and beyond beautiful. With her collection, The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, she's created something truly remarkable, the kind of horror that's filled with grit and heart. Don't miss this book; it's sure to be one of the very best collections of 2023." -- Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Reluctant Immortals "Christi Nogle uses lush, inventive descriptions with surreal touches to create stories which both haunt and surprise. Her voice is distinctive, her characters richly and deeply portrayed. I was swept away." -- Steve Rasnic Tem "In this stunning collection, the familiar takes on strange and unsettling proportions. Christi Nogle’s stories are crisp, uncanny, haunting, and utterly captivating, with echoes of Shirley Jackson resonating through Nogle’s sharp and distinctive voice. Though I wanted to devour them, these are stories that deserve to be savored. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is truly weird fiction at its finest." —Jo Kaplan, author of When the Night Bells Ring "Christi Nogle takes readers on a dark yet wondrous journey through perils, horror, and thrills in this extraordinary debut collection. Behold the timelessness of these lives, these tales!" -- Eric J. Guignard, award-winning author and editor, including That Which Grows Wild and Doorways to the Deadeye "THE BEST OF OUR PAST, THE WORST OF OUR FUTURE brings to mind Big and Little Edie from Grey Gardens, but toss in some paranormal, tons of creepiness, and a Brian Evenson-esque descent through thick dread. Each story is gloriously laced with it." -- Stephanie Nelson, author of The Vein "Sophisticated, psychological horror that enfolds the reader in a shroud of fear. The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future transported me into unfamiliar and terrifying worlds where the usual laws of nature don’t apply. Suspenseful, scary, addictive." -- Catherine Cavendish, author of Dark Observation Praise for Beulah: “Nogle, like all writers with a rare knack coupled with incredible skill and imagination, makes everything she writes look easy and effortlessly ingenious. Even the Table of Contents of her latest novel, Beulah, reflects that sense of effortless ingenuity (The beginning chapter is called “When you talk to the dead”, followed by 12 month named titles, followed by the last chapter, “When you walk with the dead”). I’ve been lucky enough to publish Nogle’s short stories twice now, and I hope to publish her work many more times in the future. My initial reaction to reading this debut novel is simply this: how in the hell could this be anyone’s first novel? It’s so assured, so masterful, so in control at every level. This is not the typical mess of even the most talented writer’s first attempt at that tricky long form. This is the work of a top tier author in top form. Anyone writing a book blurb is tempted to summarize the plot and shower the book (and writer) with hyperbolic praise. I won’t do the former, and I promise you I’m not doing the latter. Nogle has all the goods, a singularly weird imagination, a tremendous sense of pacing and voice, and a mastery of clarity and control on the sentence level. Beulah will easily prove to be one of the best horror novels (never mind debut novels) of 2022. Read it. “ -Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism With a skilled and unflinching hand, Nogle guides us through layers of time and experience in Beulah. Through the eyes of reluctantly “gifted” Georgie, we see what is usually hidden—the heartbreaking and terrifying—every rich and textured detail leading to a truly satisfying payoff. I will never forget this walk with the dead. — J.A.W. McCarthy, author of SOMETIMES WE’RE CRUEL AND OTHER STORIES