Christi Nogle – Women in Horror Month

In conversation with Christi Nogle

Since Christi Nogle published her first story in 2016, she’s taken the horror scene by storm with works appearing in some of my favorite magazines including Strange Horizons, Vastarien, Dark Matter Magazine, PseudoPod, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. In 2022, she and Willow Dawn Becker co-edited the anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award® in the category for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. That same year, her debut novel Beulah (2022) won the Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Since then, she’s continued her powerhouse performance, publishing two collections of stories in 2023 with another one released this month, and she’s showing no signs of stopping. One of the things I love most about Nogle’s work is that it defies genre constraints; she writes everything from suspense and horror to science fantasy and weird fiction. Nogle’s collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future (2023) is currently on the Bram Stoker Award® ballot for Superior Achievement in a Collection, proving once again that she is a writer to watch. –Carina Bissett

About Christi Nogle

Christi Nogle is the author of the Shirley Jackson Award nominated and Bram Stoker Award® winning first novel Beulah (Cemetery Gates Media) 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 (Flame Tree Press). Her work has also appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Vastarien. She is co-editor with Willow Dawn Becker of the Stoker-nominated anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror (Weird Little Worlds) and co-editor with Ai Jiang of Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia (Shortwave Publishing). Follow her at https://christinogle.com and on across social media @christinogle.

Interview with Christi Nogle

BISSETT: What was your first experience with horror?

NOGLE: This is an interesting question because I don’t know if it’s meant as “horror media” or “real-life horror.” I remember having several horrific experiences as well as a number of spooky and disturbing experiences as a child before I ever started watching or reading horror. For example, a time a horse my mother and I were riding fell over and I was trapped underneath, barely saved by the concavity between the ground and the saddle, my mother screaming in terror, sure I was dead. A time a tornado hit when we were shopping in town and we had to stop and seek entry at a stranger’s house—I remember our truck going up on two wheels and the rush into their rec room where I watched from under their pool table as the storm destroyed their back yard. The time we got a call that a teenage relative had committed suicide, and the whole house seemed to explode in confusion and grief. All of these experiences happened before I started school, and then there was a lot more that happened later. A lot of religious trauma at home that I don’t have time to get into here. I went to religious schools where the principal would have the “board of education” hanging over his desk, and I remember being terrified I would do something and be punished in public, and terrified when I saw other kids bent over and hit with the paddle. I was always afraid of the dark, too, imagining I saw ghosts and monsters in the shadows.

The first intentional horror media I was exposed to made an immediate mark. I think I was primed to receive it. At my very first sleepover, we saw The Watcher in the Woods on VHS. I couldn’t get the ideas out of my head for weeks afterward—uncanny images appearing in mirrors, seances and disembodied spirits, aliens trapped on earth and such (sorry if I am spoiling this 1980 film, by the way). Soon after, I happened to find a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, then Lois Duncan’s Summer of Fear and ruminated on those in a similar way, then once I could buy things of my own at Waldenbooks, it was a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s works, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and Misery (and soon, the rest of his oeuvre), V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, Clive Barker’s Cabal. I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street and a ton of other movies, on and on and on.

BISSETT: What attracts you to horror as a genre?

NOGLE: I think it’s just always felt more immersive and truer to my outlook and experiences than other genres. It feels familiar to me.

BISSETT: What do you think the future holds for women working in horror?

NOGLE: I think that the future looks bright for people of all genders working in horror right now. As far as I can tell, the genre is thriving. There are a lot of new ideas, new markets, and experimentation, as well as great enthusiasm among readers (though we could always use more of them). I would love to see the horror sections of bookstores keep growing and better channels of distribution open up for indie and small press books. I would especially love to see more movies and anthology series being made from the work of newer horror authors!

BISSETT: What women authors or works would you recommend to readers?

NOGLE: I love novels, but I feel like novels are generally at the forefront of people’s minds already, so I’ll mention some short fiction.

Of course, I would recommend any themed anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, but especially When Things Get Dark, and both she and Paula Guran have year’s best anthologies I think people should be reading. Lee Murray co-edited a wonderful anthology called Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (with Geneve Flynn) and the short essay collection Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror(with Angela Yuriko Smith). Lindy Ryan’s recent anthology Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga is being followed up this year by Mother Knows Best: Tales of Handmade Horror. Willow Dawn Becker has Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, which I co-edited, and the more recent Playlist of the Damned, and more. These give just a tiny sample of the many wonderful anthologies being edited by women.

All of these authors have fantastic single-author collections, and some of them have several: Paula D. Ashe, Nadia Bulkin, Kristi DeMeester, Tananarive Due, Gemma Files, Camilla Grudova, Shirley Jackson, L.S. Johnson, R.J. Joseph, Gwendolyn Kiste, Kelly Link, Caitlin Marceau, P.L. McMillan, S.P. Miskowski, J.A.W. McCarthy, Premee Mohammad, Suzan Palumbo, Sarah Read, M. Rickert, Lynda E. Rucker, Priya Sharma, Angela Sylvaine, Sonora Taylor, Tamika Thompson, Lisa Tuttle, and A.C. Wise. Again, just a small sample of the work out there.

I bet I have overlooked some of your favorites here. Find time to hoot about them this month, okay?

BISSETT: Do you feel there are unique challenges faced by women in horror?

NOGLE: Yes. There are a lot of challenges I haven’t been affected by and I’m sure there are others I’m not even aware of, but one I keep noticing recently is the significant number of avid readers who seem resistant to reading works by women and nonbinary folks. This is nothing new, and I think it has lessened over time, but it’s still noticeable when I look at the works people recommend, especially when it comes to the more out-of-the way subgenres. Women in Horror Month definitely helps, though!

BISSETT: What are you currently working on? 

NOGLE: I have been concentrating on novels for a while now. I just finished my second novel in December and promptly began drafting my third. It is now at the stage where I think I ought to set it aside for a while so that I can read it with more objectivity, so I’ve decided to work on short stories for a few weeks. I finished the first one last night, and it felt great! The last couple of short stories I’ve written have been for invitations, so I’m excited to write some new ones and get them on submission. It’s fun to watch the Submission Grinder stats and search for new markets—or at least that’s my idea of fun.

BISSETT: You have worked in many roles including those as an author and as an editor. How do you balance these various components of your career? 

NOGLE: Yes, I edit and also teach workshops from time to time. I greatly enjoy doing editing work of various types—I read for PseudoPod and have read for other magazines and anthologies in the past, as well as co-editing Mother: Tales of Love and Terror with Willow Dawn Becker and Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia and co-editor with Ai Jiang. I also do quite a bit of beta reading for various friends, too, which is related to editing.

It’s not really a balance because the writing comes first, for me, but I think of editing and teaching as a way of giving service to the writing community. Someone has to do the planning and presentations in order for a workshop class to run. A few someones have to read hundreds of stories for an anthology to come together. I am fortunate to have the time and to have enough reading experience behind me to feel confident doing these things. 

About The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future by Christi Nogle (Flame Tree Press, 2023) 

The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is whimsical and dreadful, verdant and sinister. Readers of “quiet horror” or “slow-burn horror” will enjoy this collection.

“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

The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future collects Christi Nogle’s finest psychological and supernatural horror stories. Their rural and small-town characters confront difficult pasts and look toward promising but often terrifying futures. The pieces range in genre from psychological horror through science fiction and ghost stories, but they all share fundamental qualities: feminist themes, an emphasis on voice, a focus on characters’ psychologies and a sense of the gothic in contemporary life. Stories here may recall Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Renegade,” or Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals.”

About One Eye Opened in That Other Place by Christi Nogle (Flame Tree Press, March 2024) 

Christi Nogle has established herself as a modern Ray Bradbury, this collection adds fantasy, slipstream, and fabulism to her canon.

One Eye Opened in That Other Place collects Christi Nogle’s best weird and fantastical stories. The collection focuses on liminal spaces and the borders between places and states of mind. Though you might not find a traditional portal fantasy here, you will travel across thresholds and arrive at other places and times that are by turns disquieting, terrifying, and wonderful. Get up close with the local flora and fauna, peruse the weird art exhibits and special shows, and consider taking a dip in the mossy, snail-filled tank of water. Make sure to bring your special glasses

This new collection will appeal to readers of Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Wilkinson, Steve Rasnic Tem, M. Rickert, Lynda E. Rucker and Stephen King’s novel Lisey’s Story.

Carina Bissett

Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. She is the author of numerous shorts stories, which are featured in her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations (Trepidatio Publishing, 2024), and she is the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. She is currently a Bram Stoker finalist for her essay “Words Wielded by Women” (Apex Magazine, 2023), a comprehensive retrospective of women in horror. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.

Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

In this powerful debut, Carina Bissett explores the liminal spaces between the magical and the mundane, horror and humor, fairy tales and fabulism. A young woman discovers apotheosis at the intersection of her cross-cultural heritage. A simulacrum rebels against her coding to create a new universe of her own making. A poison assassin tears the world apart in the relentless pursuit of her true love—the one person alive who can destroy her. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations erases expectations, forging new trails on the map of contemporary fiction. Includes an introduction by Julie C. Day, author of Uncommon Miracles and The Rampant. 

Praise for Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

Check out Steve Stred’s Review of Dead Girl Driving here

“Carina Bissett is one of my favorite speculative authors writing today—magic and myth, horror and revenge, wonder and hope. Her stories are original, lyrical, and haunting—Shirley Jackson mixed with Ursula LeGuin and a dash of Neil Gaiman. An amazing collection of stories.—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion, a Bram Stoker Award finalist

“Carina Bissett’s collection is a thing of wonder and beauty. It is a true representation of Carina herself: whimsical, visceral, lovely, and fierce. You can hear women’s voices screaming while roses fall from their lips. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations is a triumph.”—Mercedes M. Yardley, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Little Dead Red

“From fairy tale revisions to fresh takes on monstrous transitions and the absolute horrors of being female, no one knows how to write a story like Carina Bissett. Fierce yet fragile.”—Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart

“In a debut collection weaving folklore and fairy tale and told in magical, lyrical, irresistible prose, Carina Bissett inveigles readers with the breadth of her skill. A feat of woven wonder, with spells sketched in the air and strands stretched taut, Dead Girl Driving and Other Devastations is an enchanting tapestry of silken stories, the collection establishing Bissett as a world-class author of fabulism, fantasy, and horror. A must-read for lovers of Neil Gaiman, Angela Slatter, and Carmen Maria Machado.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Awards-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“Ravishing flights of fantasy.”—Priya Sharma, Shirley Jackson award-winning author of All the Fabulous Beasts and Ormeshadow

“Dark, often violent, Dead Girl, Driving & Other Devastations doesn’t lie to you about the nature of its stories. Between the title page and the Afterword lies a harrowing alliance of nightmare and fairytale. The pages are full of strange birds, resurrections, second chances, monstrous women, enchantments, and inventions. These stories explore a dark and permissive imagination, unafraid to disturb the monster at the back of the cave. It is a collection for the brave and forlorn, for those seeking escape, vengeance, transformation, or grace. There is wonder here, and freedom from shackles—for those fierce enough to wrench loose of them.”—C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter

“Carina’s short stories are absolutely luminous and deeply unsettling. Savour this collection like a fine blood-red wine. It’s absolute perfection and will linger long after the pages are closed.”—KT Wagner

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