One Eye Opened in That Other Place by Christi Nogle

(Flame Tree Press, 2024)

Reviewed by Steven French

It hasn’t been that long since a collection of Christi Nogle’s stories was last reviewed here (see BSFA Review 21, Summer 2023: review of The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future), so some readers, at least, may know what to expect: creepiness aplenty, occasionally transitioning to the explicitly weird and disturbing. This latest compilation was influenced, we are told, by the Covid-19 pandemic and ‘the way that it forced us to reimagine our lives’. To be honest, it is not always straightforward to discern such forced reimagining as a unifying theme in what is, in the end, a rather disparate, if overall unsettling, set of twenty-seven pieces, of wildly assorted lengths.

The pandemic’s influence can perhaps most obviously be seen in one of the longer stories, ‘A Chronicle of the Mole-Year’, in which a town enters a kind of voluntary hiatus during which the usual physical and biological processes are suspended. Told from the perspective of a young girl, this example of ‘cozy-weird lit’ nicely captures that feeling of wanting to just tuck oneself away somewhere. But, of course, the narrator’s initial sense of excitement eventually gives way to disquiet as some of the consequences of collective isolation become apparent, particularly when it comes to her own family.

Families and other relationships, both whole and broken, anchor many of these tales. In another of the longer and, to my mind, more effective pieces, ‘In Dark Tabbitree’, a blended family escapes to the small town of the title, so-called from the corruption of ‘Tapestry’, which is how the surrounding landscape appears. However, appearances are deceptive, of course, and it turns out that people born there can literally navigate the fabric of this place. That includes the father and their child, which doesn’t bode well for the family as a whole, but the reader’s expectations are then subverted as in this case blood is not thicker than water.

Alternatively, in the title story, ‘One Eye Opened In That Other Place’, we are invited to observe the beginning of a relationship, as it develops between Charles and Dottie. But this can be no ordinary love story, of course, as Charles possesses a third eye, through which a red-tinged and strangely alluring other world can be perceived. Needless to say, his efforts to take Dottie with him into this other realm do not end well.

‘The Portrait of Basil Hallward’ also centres on a burgeoning relationship, only this time one that develops, surreally, between an artist and his painting. The canvas is then turned, as it were, when a brutal crime requires some form of inhuman vengeance. ‘Little Cat, Little Hare’, on the other hand, presents the inverse transformation when a typically procrastinating grad student is compelled to find the artist behind a set of pictures she discovers in a flea market. Ignoring readers’ cries not to walk into the darkened house as the clouds gather and both night and thunderous rain fall, our hapless young woman becomes ‘no longer a visitor’ but something else entirely. This refrain about art and its transformative power is also made evident in ‘Smaller Still Than Me’, which takes a sideways look at the sculpting of a self-portrait by a resident artist seeking some form of validation, if only from her own creation.

That often times tempting thought of creating or becoming something other is also to the forefront in ‘The Encausting’. Here the cosmeticians’ cautions about clogged pores are taken to the extreme but conjoined with the sense of inevitability there is a feeling of acceptance. Perhaps that is meant to be another jumble of emotional flotsam left after the waves of Covid—the idea that we might just ‘let be what will be’. Both that and the sense of infantile security that comes from being wrapped up and held tight also feature in ‘Threads Like Wire, Like Vine’, where the sense of being enfolded is literally embodied in fabric form.

A somewhat scarier riff on the above thought of otherness is played out in ‘Every Day’s A Party (With You)’, which begins as one of those small-town-around-the-time-of-Christmas tales. It then gradually morphs from cosy to creepy as the true nature of the woman running the bookshop is revealed. This is one of the more conventional stories in the collection, which stands in stark contrast with the likes of ‘The Second Attempt’, a one-page vignette of birth and flames and desperation. Similarly brief is ‘A White Filigree’, which initially has a Red Riding Hood feel to it and then suggests that it’s not the wolf, but the woods you have to watch out for.

Both more substantive and more memorable is the final piece, ‘Night, When Windows Turn to Mirror’. Opening in homely fashion with Maxine making supper for her wheelchair-bound father, it quickly departs for Alice-in-Wonderland territory as she looks for him through room after ever-different room, while repeatedly spiralling back to check on the spaghetti. That contrast between mundanity and the bizarre is gradually heightened as Maxine grows increasingly desperate and the story ends with her father’s voice still calling out as she plunges deeper into the labyrinth.

Here again, perhaps, we have a literary symptom of the pandemic, not only in the overt expression of the loss of loved ones, but also in the more subversive sense of a collective absence of some form of reassurance that still calls to us but remains out of reach, while we insist on continuing the search for it.

Review from BSFA Review 24 - Download your copy here.