Interview with Christi Nogle | Author of Beulah

Interview with Christi Nogle, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Beulah. Photo courtesy of the author.

Author Christi Nogle sounds so sweet in person, you’d never know she was capable of writing such dark fiction. “I like to write stories with a strong feeling of disquiet in them,” the soft-spoken author said, flashing the sweetest grin on our Zoom call. “And usually there’s a big disturbance that leaves readers unsettled.” But don’t be fooled Nogle’s charm. She writes stories that are as frightening as they are beautiful — moody contemporary gothic horror pieces mixed with science fiction and lots of weirdness, all told with a literary bent. “New readers can often expect small town settings like an old farmhouse or a Victorian mansion, usually with heavy vines crawling everywhere and strangling things.” Her stories are seductive, finding a way to charm the reader before things go horribly off the rails. A tormented mother rids herself of an unloved child. A teenager who can see ghosts finds herself pursued by malevolent forces. A lovestruck couple discovers a terrifying way to immunize themselves from a zombie horde. There’s no limit to the horrors she’s capable of conjuring.

Nogle has been on a roll lately. She’s made some noteworthy wins in the Bram Stoker Awards — it’s like the Oscars for horror writers. Her debut novel, Beulah, won an award for Superior Achievement for a First Novel and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Two other books she worked on were nominated as well, including her first short story collection, The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, an anthology she co-edited. Since then, she’s released two other notable short story collections. A slew of new stories are on the way too, as well as her second novel, which she recently completed and is looking for a home. Nogle’s got all this going on, and tons of personality too. What’s not to love?

Interview

Where do you get your story ideas?
I get a lot of ideas from dreams and daydreams. Sometimes I’ll ruminate on things and play out worst-case scenarios or sort of obsess over situations. A lot of ideas come from that.

What’s your favorite story written by you?
Probably “The Pelt” in The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future. It's a story about a woman getting banished to this mansion on a stretch of land that’s all burned up, with burned trees in the background and things like that. I really enjoyed writing it. I think it sounds a lot different from my other work. It's the type of prose that I aspire to and don't always get to, so I like that one a lot.

What’s your favorite story written by someone else?
If you ask me on a different day of the week I'd probably tell you different short story.  But one of my favorite short stories at the moment is called “The Lovely House (previously called “A Visit”) by Shirley Jackson.  It's a little different from a lot of her other work, a little more surreal. It reminds me a bit of Angela Carter’s work. It's about someone going to visit at a friend's house and all this strange goings-on that transpire there.  

What themes do you find yourself returning to most often in your work?
I find myself turning a lot to the theme of disillusionment, like when someone been promised something but they don't get it. Or they've been hoping for something or they believe in something and it turns out to be false.

Why do you think that is?
Probably because it's something that happened to me quite a bit in childhood. These are often situations that are emotionally fraught. You know, if you spend weeks or months or however long yearning for something and then it doesn't come true, it's very upsetting. And it's usually really memorable.

What piece of writing advice has significantly transformed your work?
Probably a piece of advice I got in a workshop from the novelist Jean Hegland, who wrote this post-apocalyptic novel called Into the Forest. She talked about getting feedback from people in critique groups and it's always up to you, the writer, to figure out what to do with. For example, someone might look at your story and say it's too confusing. So naturally, you might think that means you need to make it less confusing. But you need to sit down and look at  it for a minute.  Maybe you could try to make it less confusing. Or you could ignore them and keep it as it is.  Maybe you need to say, “No, I meant for this to confuse you.” Then it becomes a case of how do you make it clear that you're supposed to be confused here?  Jean really complicated the idea of what feedback means and how to approach it. 

A spell transforms you into a famous witch from pop culture — which witch would you be?
Sandra Bullock from Practical Magic. She's just lovely. She's got this fabulous little home and a sort of Gilmore Girls style life, you know? And she has all this hope and a big sense of wonder and her little family. So, probably her.

Read more interviews with horror authors here.

Learn more about Christi Nogle here.