The Good Eye

by Jess Gibson

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Startling, spellbinding stories, in which appearances and intentions are rarely what they seem

A psychic harnesses her talent for animal communication to extract a perfect revenge. A stone appears in a woman’s pocket like a charm, only to end up lodged in her partner’s throat. A condescending artist, who considers his girlfriend too conventional, throws a dinner party where he’s served a painful and consequential truth.

Jess Gibson brings us twelve probing, sideways tales that wrestle with the limits of perception and possibility. The men and women in her stories confront contradictory forces: the beautiful can turn grotesque, the exalted can fall into disgrace, the genius can be proved an impostor. Sharp, funny, surprising, and utterly original, The Good Eye announces a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction.

 

Release date: May 12, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

The rats run along oily rat highways at dusk. Noses down, quick, pretty feet. They like the edges of buildings. They like the leafy underbrush. Occasionally they become bold and venture into the open, exploring things left in gardens: a child’s shoe, a trowel. They discover treasures: chunks of discarded birthday cake, a bunch of grapes. They taste basil and oregano leaves but they prefer grease, and they hunt for chicken bones and cheese rinds in fragrant summer garbage. They dig with little efficient fingers. They run across expensive Sunbrella upholstered outdoor sofas and teak dining sets, surveying barbecues and drinking from watering cans. Their brown coats are glossy and they are sleek and fat and happy.

Luella’s two-year-old mishears her mother: “Mama saw a cat,” she says. “Mama saw a cat.” She knows about mice but there are no rats in her picture books.

“Mama saw a cat.” She varies the emphasis: “Mama saw a cat, Mama saw a cat.” She giggles but must have picked something up from Luella’s tone because at night she wakes wailing: “Mama saw a cat!”

The next day Luella takes her to the window. “See? No cats. And no rats. They all went somewhere else.”

“They went somewhere else!” Luella’s daughter laughs.

“That’s right.”

“They went on a trip!”

“Yes, they did.”

“They went on an airplane!”

“Maybe they did. Now there are just butterflies,” says Luella. “See?”

The super calls an exterminator. Small and portly, he arrives with a stack of black rat-bait stations. Over his shoulder he carries a canister of cockroach poison like a backpack attached to a long grimy hose with a metal spray tip.

Although they’ve never met, he greets Luella like an old friend: “I haven’t seen you for a while! I had to take some time off: I got cancer.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” says Luella.

“I went down to Miami,” he whispers. “To recover from the operation.”

“Oh dear,” Luella says. “But Florida must have been nice.” Which she feels immediately is the wrong thing to say but the exterminator seems not to notice.

“Yeah, I love Florida. And now I feel great. I made a great recovery.” He grins as he motions to the toxic backpack. “You need any?”

“No, we’re okay.”

He avoids saying “poison” and “cockroaches.” Instead he says, “Just a little behind the stove? That’s where they like to go! And the dishwasher. They love the dishwasher. You look in your dishwasher?”

“Yes I have,” Luella replies.

“You didn’t see anything in there?” He sounds disappointed.

“No, it’s actually outside that we’ve been noticing a few rats.”

“Yeah. I put down some bait already. You should always have some bait out, and consider it for the roaches. Better safe than sorry. I see all these people who don’t want it, don’t want it, don’t want it, and then suddenly they’ve got a major problem. I mean major.”

“I’m okay today.” Luella shakes her head. “But I’ll let you know next time if it’s needed.”

“I mean like a major, major problem. You’ve never seen roaches like this. Crawling everywhere. Like a rug. And all up the walls.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think so. I have a toddler who plays a lot on the floor.”

“Okay, okay.” He shrugs.

“I hope you continue to feel better.” Luella gives him a sympathetic smile.

That night Luella watches the rats run past the bait station, totally uninterested, and onto her deck. They lift their noses to the air, sniffing here and there. Luella thinks they look right at her.

Luella is often described as having a “sunny” disposition. Her mother claims that she’d been a naturally cheerful baby. But she’s also been lucky: she is attractive and easy to like. She doesn’t question things too much. People who ruminate get wrinkles and ulcers. She can see it in her friends: wilting and crinkling from frowning. Lighten up, Luella tells them, stress makes everything worse. But now she can’t stop thinking about the rats. She imagines them coming inside, scampering into her daughter’s room at night, running over the crib and pawing the wooden stacking toys. Her house is a permeable shell, and rats only need the tiniest crack to pour themselves through. At dusk she peers out the windows, waiting for their quick, shadowy forms to begin skirting the fence, scouting for spoils. And there they are, wandering beside her new boxwood hedge and the sandbox she’d made for her daughter. They leave oily streaks on her bluestone patio. Even from behind glass Luella thinks she can smell them.

When it gets dark, she sits in the circle of light from her desk lamp, searching on her computer: rat habits; rat control; rat diseases; rat species; rat poison; rat bites. If only she could somehow convince them, without resorting to awful chemical poisons, that it would be better to relocate elsewhere. She types in “animal communication” and there, suddenly, right at the top of the page, is Caroline. Although slimmer and blow-dried and wearing patterned silk, it’s unmistakably Caroline smiling in front of a mandala wall hanging and a photogenic fern. Kismet, thinks Luella.

Luella first met Caroline years earlier when she was trying to sell a Victorian row house. She’d halved her commission because her client, Susan, was an acquaintance whose mother had fallen down the stairs in her house and died. She was always in perfect health, said Susan. She had great balance. I don’t understand it: we’d expected her to live until at least ninety. By the time they got her to the hospital she was already dead. The doctors called it a “catastrophic fall.” Susan was tearfully grateful for the discounted commission. It’s the least I can do, said Luella with the warmth that made her good at her job. People felt at home with her: comfortable, seen. When she showed them houses for sale, the houses seemed cozy and welcoming too.

But not Susan’s mother’s house. It was a late nineteenth-century brick town house with all original woodwork and some nice stained glass. The floors were beautiful parquet with mahogany inlay and there was a marble mantel. With some updating to the kitchen and baths it could be very pretty. Luella thought the sale would be a cinch. She showed it and showed it, but nobody made an offer. She dropped the price—so it was really a steal—but still, nothing.

“Crickets,” she said to Susan. “And I have no idea why.”

Not even a couple who were, they told Luella, looking for exactly this kind of house in exactly this area, for exactly this price. When Luella left them alone in the front room for a minute, she overheard them:

“I don’t know, honey, this house has a bad feeling.”

“The upstairs is really nice.”

“But the rest of it is dark. Don’t you feel that? It’s so creepy. I could never live here.”

Luella pretended she hadn’t heard. But after she shut the door behind them and waved cheerily through the glass, she stood for a minute looking out the window as they walked away and suddenly she felt it too. There was something uneasy, something watching. Something in the house. And she realized that she’d known all along: never staying there by herself for more than a few minutes, never waiting for clients in the front room, sitting outside on the stoop. She didn’t like the place. That night she left as fast as she could.

Luella wasn’t about to phone up a priest and explain about Susan’s mother needing to be exorcized. She wasn’t religious and Susan’s mother hadn’t been either. So she decided to try a New Age bookstore called Wonderworking. It smelled of sandalwood and there were displays of goddess figurines, tarot cards, and crystals. An elfin girl behind the counter widened her eyes in immediate understanding. They saw this kind of thing all the time, she said, and suggested Shawn, a “spirit healer” who had done some workshops at the store. “He’s great with entities,” said the girl.

On the phone Shawn was empathetic. “Naturally the house feels uneasy,” he told Luella. “There’s no such thing as a positive ghost: when ghosts keep returning to a physical location, we don’t like it of course, but it’s not good for them either. They’re not where they’re supposed to be. They have to be pushed through.”

Luella had some second thoughts, but Shawn showed up at the appointed time looking perfectly normal and quite attractive in a pair of faded jeans and a white T-shirt. She guessed he was a youthful forty, with mild brown eyes and subtle woven bracelets on muscular arms. Beautiful hands. He carried a sporty knapsack that proved to hold essential oils and some small brass bells. Beside him was Caroline. Young and awkward then, with ill-cut hair and a red nose. She was his student, Shawn said proudly, and one of the most gifted psychics he’d ever met.

Caroline looked adoringly at Shawn and blushed. Then the three of them walked through the house together.

“Here,” said Caroline, when they got to the bottom of the stairs.

“Yeah,” drawled Shawn. “Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.”

“What?” asked Luella. “What do you see?”

“Well…” Shawn held Luella’s gaze a bit longer than necessary. “There’s nothing in the house right now, but I feel a disruption here, a portal. Don’t you?”

“A portal?” asked Luella.

“A portal to another plane,” Caroline explained softly. “Where they come and go.”

“I see,” said Luella. “Can you close the portal?”

Shawn looked at Caroline, who nodded. “Yes. Easily. This isn’t Susan’s mother’s house anymore. She needs to move on to her next experience.”

Shawn and Caroline walked back and forth with burning bundles of sticks, and rang some bells, and swabbed thresholds with lavender oil, and then sat together on the floor. Caroline hummed quietly, never taking her eyes off Shawn. Luella understood why. He really was handsome, she thought.

When they were done, Shawn held Luella’s hand and said, “Call me if there are any further problems.” Like he was a plumber or a car mechanic; but his hand was electric. She could feel his touch radiating through her body. “There shouldn’t be, but you know where to find me.” When Luella looked up she saw Caroline standing behind him in the door, watching them as if she might cry.

The house sold in a week. It had, the new owners said, such a joyful feeling. They’d made an offer over asking price immediately.

Luella didn’t have to phone Shawn to thank him personally. She could have sent a note. She didn’t have to follow up at all, but she was still single then and she knew chemistry when she felt it. She did think for a minute about Caroline’s face crumpling, her eyes pleading. But Caroline was too young for Shawn. And anyway, the decision was his and it was already made. There was nothing Luella could do.

Later, she remembers teasing him in bed: “I bet you don’t know what I’m thinking now? And now? And now?”

“I can guess.” He grinned.

“Can you indeed?”

When she asked him how he’d gotten into his line of work, he grinned again. The grin was his specialty: childlike, mischievous, as though he was letting you in on a . . .