Publisher Description

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. 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." AUTHOR: Christi Nogle writes psychological and supernatural horror, dark science fiction, and weird fiction. She is the author of the collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future and the novel Beulah. Her short stories have appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Vastarien, Escape Pod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Dark Matter Magazine along with anthologies such as C.M Muller's Nightscript series, Humans Are the Problem from Weird Little Worlds, Mixtape: 1986 from The Dread Machine, and Flame Tree's American Gothic and Chilling Crime.

Author Biography

Christi Nogle writes psychological and supernatural horror, dark science fiction, and weird fiction. She is the author of the collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future and the novel Beulah. Her short stories have appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Vastarien, Escape Pod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Dark Matter Magazine along with anthologies such as C.M Muller's Nightscript series, Humans Are the Problem from Weird Little Worlds, Mixtape: 1986 from The Dread Machine, and Flame Tree's American Gothic and Chilling Crime. Christi loves learning and has studied visual arts as well as writing and literature. After twenty years teaching academic writing and occasional literature classes at a university, Christi moved on to spend more time focusing on her own fiction and supporting other writers in the horror and speculative writing communities. She enjoys sharing stories and critiques in various writing groups, mentoring and volunteering for writers' organizations, teaching creative writing workshops, and learning more about editing and promotion. She is also an Associate Editor at the popular horror podcast PseudoPod.She continues to write short fiction and is working on a new novel, All My Really Good Friends. She also hopes to someday return to painting, which was an obsession for many years.Christi is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and Codex Writers' Group. She lives in Boise, Idaho with her partner Jim and their gorgeous dogs. Follow her at christinogle.com or on Twitter @christinogle

Review

"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
"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
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
"Christi Nogle's The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future is unsettling and terrific short fiction in the vein of Shirley Jackson." -- Kelly Link, author of GET IN TROUBLE
"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
"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
"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
"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
"[Nogle] makes everything she writes look easy and effortlessly ingenious [...] 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." -- Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism
"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." -- Jo Kaplan, author of When the Night Bells Ring

Promotional

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.

Long Description

Warning: this book is filled with Virginia Creeper, decaying and expanding houses, unrecognizable faces in the mirror, cosmic parasites, complicated love affairs, deserts and desert flowers, towers of water-damaged books, unreliable narrators, frustrated artists, trees and sculptures depicting trees, algae and fungi, a multitude of windows and doors, several grandmothers, pies, puppies with human features, dollhouses, homunculi, dream imagery, and many, many ghosts. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Futurecollects 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." A few of the stories: In the title story, a secret summer love affair takes a strange and disorienting turn. "The Pelt" chronicles a woman struggling to endure life alone in a decaying mansion. In "Unschooled," a young woman wanders into the outskirts of Boise in search of a safe place to give birth to her pups. The story "Resilience" shows how the past can reach into the present, challenging one's very identity. The post-apocalyptic story "A Children's Treasury of Windows and Doors" centers on a mysterious extra volume in a set of children's books. "In the Country" begins with a mother's observations of a child's wrongness and asks the reader to discern an order in chaos. Like her novel Beulah, these stories reflect Christi's interests, preoccupations, and main literary influences: nineteenth-century Realism, classic horror, ghost stories, slipstream, and fabulism. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Futureis whimsical and dreadful, verdant and sinister. Readers of "quiet horror" or "slow-burn horror" will enjoy this collection.

Review Quote

"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."

Promotional "Headline"

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

Details