Promise - Christi Nogle - ★★

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AUTHOR: Christi Nogle
GENRE: Speculative Fiction Anthology.
RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A speculative fiction anthology. The author has imagination for sure, but the content was too unstructured for me.


This is a collection of twenty stories of speculative fiction. However, despite the common genre, the stories are quite distinct from each other in terms of content. The stories come from a variety of sub-genres such as sci-fi, absurdist, horror and light fantasy.

The author’s wild imagination is amply visible in the stories, as she covers themes that are as weird as promised. Every story has an original element, some of which are truly unique. The lengths of the stories vary, but each has enough pages to flesh out its plot.

Based on the above, the collection should have blown me away. But the fact is that none of the stories worked well for me. I am an avid reader of short fiction in varying genres, so it’s not like this failed so miserably for me because of the length or the story structure or the genre. Looking at other readers’ feedback makes me feel like I fell short of the minimum requirements for this novel rather than the other way around.

I knew that the stories would be surreal, I was still hoping that they would have some kind of structure or flow. But they proved too ad hoc in development for my taste. Despite the adequate number of pages in each story, it felt like the ideas were explored only at a surface level. The stories seemed like they began in between a situation, and the endings were also abrupt. Many of the stories appeared to have been terminated at the penultimate point, leaving me dangling in vain for some kind of closure. A couple of the stories left me confused because the narration didn’t offer me any clue about the identity of the narrator, without which I found it tough to visualise the proceedings.

As always, I rated the stories individually, but not even one of them touched the four star mark for me. The range of ratings was between 1 star to 3 stars. The best stories for me were “Finishers” and “Cubby”.

The blurb compares the stories to Ray Bradbury’s work, but I honestly feel that the comparison is farfetched. Simply having a futuristic sci-fi vibe in the tales isn’t enough to make it resemble Bradbury’s work.

That said, mine is very much an outlier opinion for this collection. A majority of readers have relished it for the novelty it offers. So do read other reviews before you make up your mind about this anthology.

The author does have potential in terms of imagination, so I won’t write her off my list just yet. But maybe I wouldn’t try an anthology in future but would wait for a longer work. After all, she is the WINNER of the 2022 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

My thanks to Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Promise”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

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