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.

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.
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A special thank you to Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.