Beulah - Novel Review
Welcome back, dear reader!
I’ve got a special week in store for you! Today, I’ll be posting my review of the book, Beulah, and on Thursday, I’ll be posting the interview I had with the book’s author, Christi Nogle! In the interview, we talk writing, fiction, and deep dive the novel so be sure to check it out!
The Author
Christi Nogle’s works have appeared in fifty publications, including PseudoPod, Escape Pod, Vastarien, and Dark Matter Magazine. Her novel, Beulah, is out now and her first collection, The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, is coming in early 2023.
Christi loves learning and has studied visual arts as well as writing and literature. After twenty years teaching academic writing at a university, Christi moved on to spend more time focusing on her own fiction and supporting other writers in the horror and speculative writing communities. She enjoys sharing stories and critiques in various writing groups, mentoring and volunteering for writers’ organizations, teaching creative writing workshops, and learning more about editing and promotion. She is also an Associate Editor at the popular horror podcast PseudoPod and coeditor of Mother: Tales of Love and Terror from Weird Little Worlds.
She continues to write short fiction and is working on a new novel, All My Really Good Friends. She also hopes to someday return to painting, which was an obsession for many years. — Christi’s website
You can find Christi on her website or follow her on Twitter.
The Book
Beulah is the story of Georgie, an eighteen-year-old with a talent (or affliction) for seeing ghosts. Georgie and her family have had a hard time since her father died, but she and her mother Gina and sisters Tommy and Stevie are making a new start in the small town of Beulah, Idaho where Gina’s wealthy friend Ellen has set them up to help renovate an old stone schoolhouse. Georgie experiences a variety of disturbances—the town is familiar from dreams and she seems to be experiencing her mother’s memory of the place, not to mention the creepy ghost in the schoolhouse basement—but she is able to maintain, in her own laconic way, until she notices that her little sister Stevie also has the gift. Stevie is in danger from a malevolent ghost, and Georgie tries to help, but soon Georgie is the one in danger. — Beulah Amazon landing page
Beulah is an ethereal, emotional journey of a young woman named Georgie, who struggles to find her place in the world — all the while, trying to get a handle on her strange gift and protect her family at the same time.
The Review
Character-driven and heavy with atmosphere, Beulah pulls the reader into a slow-burning ghost story as surreal as a dream, but rife with brutal moments of harsh reality. Gothic foreboding colours every page of this novel. Be warned though, don’t go into the book expecting standard jump scares and ghouls. The horror in Beulah is as subdued and as insidious as the ghosts that haunt Georgie herself.
It’s hard not to fall into the tale of Georgie, to be swept away by her romanticism, her despair, her desire to be something more, to find her own place in the world. Written in first person, Georgie’s voice and personality are realistic, clear, tragic. Her struggles to find familial approval, to protect her siblings, to find a sense of normalcy while also trying to embrace her gift is a coming-of-age journey that mirrors the struggles so many people go through every day.
I also really enjoyed Christi’s take on the paranormal and of ghosts. It wasn’t anything I ever expected, especially how the novel ends. I wasn’t prepared for how breathless it left me. This is definitely one novel I won’t be forgetting any time soon.
7/10
x PLM
