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Promise

by Christi Nogle

DETAILS:
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Format: Paperback
Length: 208 pg.
Read Date: February 1-10, 2025

What’s Promise?

This is a collection of 21 short stories. The cover calls them “weird Science Fiction” stories—this is true. When Nogle described herself in a Q&A here last year, she described herself as “focusing on horror and horror-adjacent work.” I’d say most of these qualified as Horror-adjacent; there’s just something unnerving about just about every one of these. Now, I grant you that my tolerance/acceptance of Horror is pretty low, so while I might call these Horror-adjacent, real Horror fans might roll their eyes. That’s fine, I get it. But some of these are really unnerving/creepifying.

When trying to come up with a good way to describe this collection, I saw the back of the cover blurb and decided that I couldn’t do better.

A young woman confronts her digital doppelganger at a creepy academy. A mother and daughter struggle underground, finishing robots the rich will use. A loving couple find that their mirrors are very different than mirrors used to be. You can order a headset to speak with your dog, and your devices sometimes connect not just to the web but to the afterlife.

Be prepared for strangeness here. We have several types of aliens, cults devoted to contacting alternate dimensions, virtual-reality writing retreats, time-travel games and timetravel tragedies, augmented consciousness, cosmic artforms and living paintings, haunted Zoom meetings, giant worms, and guesthouses for the dead. These stories reflect the weird and unknowable future. They are often bizarre and dreadful, but they also veer towards themes of hope, potential…and promise.

I Have So Many Questions…

A little over halfway through my notes, I wrote, “I have so many questions about her process.” I can’t tell you exactly what prompted that, but I’m pretty sure the question had been building. And I’d still like to ask a few now that I’ve been prompted.

Sure, there’s the old chestnut of “where do you get your ideas?” I know authors hate that question (and I get it), but…just how does someone come up with these? And beyond the generic planner v. pantser, I really wonder how much of these strange worlds she has worked out before she starts to tell a story in them, and how much she figures out along the way.

But also—what does the first draft look like compared to the final? Does she write everything and then pare it down to just the essentials? How does she choose the starting point for these? I know my reflex would be to start most of these stories about 8 paragraphs of story earlier than she does (and generally to give another few paragraphs at the end). How does she choose the twist/reveal/whatever it is that clues the reader into everything that’s going on?

I guess I’m just looking for a DVD commentary on each of these. Something about Nogle’s construction makes me more curious about her approach than I usually am.

So, what did I think about Promise?

So, two of these stories did nothing for me (2 out of 21 is a great number). Several I’d just qualify as “good,” but a handful wowed me. There are a couple I’m still thinking about all these months later (not steadily, mind you, but every now and then the mind will wander a bit—or I’ll see this cover, and…pow, I’m back in it).

I love Nogle’s prose and approach to storytelling. There’s some variation because no two stories have the same voice—but generally, I can say she gives you just enough to know what’s going on, but you have to use your imagination and think about it to really understand the story. There’s no spoon-feeding here, but nothing so cryptic or ambivalent as to be obscure or oblique.

Was I satisfied with the conclusion of every story? No—but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to be. Particularly the couple that really don’t conclude, but just end.

Creepy, mind-bendy, the kind of short story you can vanish into and leave the world behind. These stories will leave you feeling the way that the Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone episodes do. I rather enjoyed almost all of these and think you will, too. (and many of you will really get into the ones that left me cold, and won’t be wigged out by those that got me…we can compare lists later)

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