The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future

Christi Nogle

$16.95

Publication Date: February 21st, 2023

Publisher:

Flame Tree Press

ISBN:

9781787588035

Pages:

224

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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.

"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 the Author

Christi Nogle is the author of the Bram Stoker Award winning and Shirley Jackson Award nominated novel Beulah and the collections The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future and Promise. Her short fiction has appeared in many publications. Follow her at christinogle.com and on social media under the username christinogle.

Praise for The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future

"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