One Eye Opened in That Other Place by Christi Nogle

One Eye Opened in That Other Place Reviews

• 
  Daniel R.

  Christi Nogle’s name is not a familiar one for me, and this is the first concentrated dose of the author’s short fiction I’ve had. The writing is lyrical, poetic. The characters are drawn well. The circumstances they find themselves involved in run a gamut from the chilling to the warmly inviting. Her characters live in worlds with hidden corners and edges, abysses waiting for the curious eye to notice them so they might gaze right back. Sometimes this may be welcome; often not.
  
  With a table of contents boasting twenty-seven yarns and a page count that clocks in at less than 250 pages, the author has little room for wasted words. Nogle is a skilled wordsmith, one that sands away any fluff or excess, leaving lean stories powered by potent sentences and ideas.
  
  The theme this time around, as expressed in the cover copy, is that of liminal spaces. It is here, on the borders between the familiar and the fantastic that drama can be found, and such spaces are certainly in abundance in a plethora of places, obvious and otherwise.
  
  The book opens with a sort of dreamy fairy tale come to life. In “Playmate” a woman returns to her mother’s house on Block Island with her daughter only to find the house itself has disappeared from the beach. It has not been destroyed but mysteriously relocated uphill some ways. What could have accomplished such a feat? The answer lies partially in the protagonist’s past and in a possible friend she thought lost, forgotten but who has not forgotten her. On the heels of this comes a charming yet chilly story about Christmas rivalries and slippery memory, “Every Day’s a Party (With You)” followed by the incredibly unsettling yarn from which the collection gets its title, “One Eye Opened in That Other Place,” which finds a man with three eyes (one down between his nostril and tear duct) interacting with two very different worlds.
  
  There are some thematic linkages here, little things that show the author’s own passions (circles, particularly those composing eyes, are a motif found throughout the book), but no regurgitated material or images. The width and breadth of Nogle’s imagination is extraordinary. Not everything is a horror yarn, but many of the tales dabble with unease, mortality, and psychological unrest. There are also a few beautifully evocative tales about the different ways children and adults see and interact with the world. The best of these is the moving, “A Chronicle of the Mole-Year,” in which a young girl has the chance to vote and wish for her town to come unstuck in time for one special year. It has real heart and no small amount of honest emotion. That charming and imaginative fantasy stands shoulder to shoulder with just about anything Bradbury wrote about Green Town, Illinois both on innovative ideology as well as literary craft levels.
  
  A collection of this sort is challenging to consider, short of going piece by piece, and potentially spoiling the surprise of finding how artfully the contents are arranged. And really, going piece by piece helps no one to appreciate the individual works or overall experience.
  
  The language is careful, considered. Each sentence has weight and the flow of information is enviable in its precision and purpose. Sometimes, the author gives us a concrete sense of the places and people as more than concepts or voices. Other times, we are left to fend for ourselves with ambiguous descriptions, empty frames, or unresolved conclusions. I find this trust in the reader to keep up to be a pleasant surprise, but there will be a not-insignificant cross section of the readership that finds the writing for a given story unreadable or impenetrable. Fair warning is granted. Not all stories need to be grounded in the recognizable, and not all stories need to proceed briskly from point A to B to C to D in familiar ways. The joy of a Nogle story is in how the author chooses to explore a given topic, how she plays with language, and how the stories unfold for the characters peopling them.
  
  One Eye Opened in That Other Place is a fine entry point into this author’s work. And for those, like myself, who are coming away from the book hungry for more, let me point the way to the author’s collection from last year. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future gathers the author’s out and out horror fiction. I look forward to exploring them soon.
  #
  A special thank you to Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Alice

  As the blurb suggests, the 27 short stories that make up One Eye Opened in That Other Place, by Christi Nogle, are concerned with in-between spaces and states.
  
  In many of the pieces, characters are experiencing processes of “becoming” – and their journeys and destinations range from the subtly unsettling to the all-out horrifying.
  
  My particular favourites among these were the interesting and imaginative Every Day’s a Party (With You), where a cosy small-town Christmas takes a thrillingly horrible turn; the intriguing and absorbing The Gods Shall Lay Sore Trouble Upon Them, where a mysterious illness causes extreme self-absorption, mind-reading powers, and gradual paralysis; and the very weird and sinister Fall Into Water, Become Someone New, which defies description, quite honestly.
  
  Other characters – in common with some in Nogle’s previous collection, Promise – take time out from their normal lives in unconventional ways, or create unusual things.
  
  For example, in the enchanting and thought-provoking A Chronicle of the Mole-Year, a town votes to suspend the normal laws of physics and biology for a year, thus giving its citizens a break from the everyday demands of work, school, and their bodies.
  
  I especially loved the coming-of-age vibes of this story: while the young main character doesn’t grow older, she nonetheless becomes wiser and more introspective as she comes to consider some of the more surreal and less desirable outcomes of the arrangement.
  
  In An Education, a character learns to imagine things into existence, including, eventually, her own double. Similarly, in Smaller Still Than Me, an artist-in-residence makes a sculpture of herself that takes on a life of its own. Both of these stories put me in mind of Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamer Trilogy (a very good thing!).
  
  As you might expect given the theme of liminality, quite a few of the stories in One Eye Opened in That Other Place have dream and fairy tale flavours.
  
  Like actual dreams, the former sometimes frustrated me by ending too soon and leaving me trying to make sense of what I’d just seen. However, I did really like The Apartment, where a woman lives out her city’s dreams rather than her own, and Night, When Windows Turn to Mirror, where a woman struggles to locate her father in an ever-changing and expanding version of their house.
  
  The fairy tale-like stories are more consistently satisfying, with my favourites including the captivating The Maiden in Robes (don’t go in Grandma’s greenhouse!), the economical Gingerbread (a woman abandons her old life for a new one in the gingerbread house), and the entertaining and bittersweet The Children of Robbie (a pair of dogs mysteriously produce three human babies).
  
  One Eye Opened in That Other Place is an imaginative, thought-provoking, and appealingly unsettling short story collection.
• 
  Fatguyreading

  One Eye Opened in That Other Place is a collection 27 of short stories, all quite varied and interesting In their own right.
  
  Christi Nogle is certainly a skilled writer, weaving stories from the strange, to the chilling, to the enviting.
  
  I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, so I won't mention storylines but I will say, two of my favourite stories were Every Day's A Party ( With You ) and The Maiden in Robes ( don't go in Grandma's greenhouse ).
  
  One Eye Opened in That Other Place is thought-provoking, it's insightful, it's unsettling and everything in between.
  
  It's a book you can dip in and out of, or like me, read it in a few sittings ( 3 for me ).
  
  The characters were all incredibly well written and the stories, all interesting in their own ways.
  
  5 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 's from me.
• 
  Marie Sinadjan

  After Promise, Christi Nogle is back with another collection of weird stories! This one's even weirder than the last, or at least it seemed that way to me. The titular One Eye Opened In That Other Place is literally about a man with a third eye that opened into another place, and it only gets weirder from there.
  
  The stories that caught my attention were:
  
  * Every Day's A Party (With You) - This had very strong The Magnus Archives vibes to me, which is great as it's a favorite!
  
  * Waterfall - Those stories about being careful what you wish for? Yep.
  
  * The Portrait of Basil Hallward - I miiight just be a sucker for inanimate object POVs, so.
  
  * The Maiden in Robes - Just the kind of weird and creepy that I like.
  
  * A Chronicle of the Mole-Year - The concept of a Mole-Year was so cool! Weird, but cool. I'd like to think I'm going to get ahead of my TBR pile if I had a Mole-Year... or I might procrastinate and do nothing. Or succumb to the weirdness.
  
  * Gingerbread - Creepy houses, I'm here for them. Just don't let me live or stay in them.
  
  * Little Cat, Little Hare - If you think it's the hare that got me because I like bunnies, nope, it's not that at all. Artworks that feel alive? The artist behind them being weird? Yep.
  
  * The Pack - Creepy plants? Creepy plants.
  
  Interestingly, I learned about the term slipstream from this book, which is defined as a genre denoting forms of speculative fiction that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, or do not remain in conventional boundaries of genre and narrative, directly extending from the experimentation of the New Wave science fiction movement while also borrowing from fantasy, psychological fiction, philosophical fiction and other genres or styles of literature. If this sounds like your cup of tea, this book is for you!
  
  As it is with collections and anthologies, however, not everything might be to your liking. I certainly found myself vibing with the above stories, while the rest were just okay or even confusing.
• 
  George Dunn

  QOTD: What's a book you thought you'd love and were disappointed by?
  AOTD: For me, it has to be The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix... I KNOW right?
  
  Read my full review here:
  https://fanfiaddict.com/review-one-ey...
  
  "Thank you Flametree Press for sending me an ARC copy of “One Eye Opened In That Other Place,”  it hits shelves March 12th. As I am sure you will very quickly determine, these are my honest thoughts and feelings. “One Eye Opened In That Other Place,” is a short story collection that truly frustrated me. I felt like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, confused… and perpetually on the edge. I can tell Nogle is a fantastic writer due to the lyrical prose, and occasional diamond in the rough, but there ultimately were not enough hidden gems to redeem it for me."
• 
  Ivy Grimes

  This is an absolutely brilliant bunch of stories! There are so many levels and layers of weird in these stories, and you move through them like dreams. Intuitively, with an exciting edge of fear. Surprises everywhere. Each world is beautiful and intricate, and often quite disturbing, populated with rich colors and named flowers. An entertaining, wise, and important collection -- one that will be talked about for years to come.
• 
  Jenna

  Some of the stories were intriguing, but they were over by the time I got into them. I guess I'm not a short story fan. A handful of them I simply didn't understand. Forced myself to finish it. 🤷‍♀️