Beware the Flat-Pack Furniture: David Erik Nelson’s “The Nölmyna” - Reactor

Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover David Erik Nelson’s “The Nölmyna,” first published in May 2025 on Reactor. Spoilers ahead!

Sadie Espinoza works as a home inspector in Cincinnati. Her previous gig was providing the skeptic’s-eye-view on House & Yard TV’s Haunted House Home Inspectors. Five years after HHHI stopped production, Sadie still makes the Us Weekly “Top 10 most hated people on TV” list. Hardcore believers in the supernatural don’t like their ghosts debunked as faulty plumbing, ancient wiring, and creaky stair treads, but they watched HHHI in order to harass the debunker on social media. The last straw for Sadie was when a “stony-faced middle-aged couple” stalked her through Home Depot.

Her cousin and lifelong BFF, Itzhak Espinoza-Dorfmann, created HHHI. Though it was a big success and only in its second season, he didn’t resent Sadie’s defection. His exuberant yet shrewd creativity spawned a string of HYTV hits: Ghost Van, Polterfight, Ley Line Hunters. He keeps an LA pied à terre, but his permanent address remains in Cincinnati. He claims that he owes much to his name, which makes him sound like an old Jewish guy rather than the tall Black man he is. In school, Itzie was bullied by whites for being Black, by Blacks for being an “Oreo,” by everyone for being the son of gay men. But he didn’t get bullied for being Jewish, and felt that bullies were “picking on the idea of me, not the real me,” as he told Sadie. The observation “flipped her perspective” on the swim teammates who called her a “wetback” while pretending it was because Sadie’s thick hair was slow to dry after practice. That showed how ignorant these white girls were. The Jewish Espinozas had been in New Mexico long before it became New Mexico.

Shortly before Itzie disappears, he insists she come to his apartment—he’s finally found proof of woo-woo! “Woo-woo” was Ben’s name for supernatural phenomena. Six months after he and Sadie married, Ben died in a freakish car accident. She was three weeks pregnant. The morning of Ben’s funeral, she miscarried. Itzie shepherded her through her paralyzing grief. She’d never believed in God until Ben’s death, but “random chance couldn’t conceivably be this capricious and cruel.” On the “bright side,” if God existed, so did “indestructible souls.” Meaning Ben still existed, somewhere.

Itzie’s “woo-woo” is one of those ugly ÖLEI Nölmyna chairs that Ben wanted until he test-sat one. Itzie says it’s an “apport,” a material object appeared from an unknown source, often seen during seances and poltergeist manifestations. All apportations have proven fraudulent, until now. He demonstrates the authenticity of his by carrying the chair from his dining table to his study. Yet the chair remains at the table, while Izzie shows her an identical chair in the study, along with a mountainous pile of cloned Nölmynas! The ones in the pile are ordinary. The one that can’t be moved is legit woo-woo. When the doorbell summons Itzie for food delivery, Sadie sits on the mystery-chair.

Instantly she sinks through its mesh seat into “the other side of that thinning of the fabric of the Universe.” It looks like the city park she and Ben often walked in, except that its cherry trees grow beneath a bleached yellow sky undergirded with the terrible geometry of a honeycomb, whose hexagons fill with innumerable suns like burgeoning cancer cells. Somehow this other side is everything and everyone everywhere. Ben is there. She soaks in him, even his secrets that she never knew. It’s a relief to be with him again. It’s awful, knowing all.

Sadie bolts from the chair and the apartment. She meets Itzie coming upstairs. She’s gotta go, she tells him. She can’t, he pleads. Now that they’ve found what they’ve always dreamt of, she has to help explore it! She has to watch as he sits on the Nölmyna, which he hasn’t done yet. Sadie warns Itzie not to sit in the chair, then leaves.

Five days later, a policeman, Officer Pigott, informs her that Itzie’s missing. He’s left a note for Sadie. She meets Pigott at Itzie’s apartment to open it herself. The note’s brief. If Sadie receives it, it means Itzie sat on the chair. The chair’s now hers, sorry. He formally transfers it to her, as in a will, and signs the document. But Pigott claims the chair as police evidence and refuses to release it. They argue. She goes home, and finds the Nölmyna in her front hall.

Its illegal removal from the crime scene, along with general suspicion, brings Pigott to her door to “detain” her. Desperate, Sadie collapses against Pigott, dropping them both onto the chair. She leaps up, expecting to see that he’s vanished. Instead she watches him dissolve away, as if he’s being digested, until he’s gone like he never existed. The police, finding Pigott’s car outside Sadie’s house, grow more suspicious. They set a 24-hour watch.

The next night, Sadie sits again on the Nölmyna and falls to the other side, where Ben is everywhere. It’s sweet and awful to be with him, all of him. Itzie and Pigott are there, too, worn to skeletal thinness, their skin seeming to bleed off in tendrils. They’ve learned so much here over the years since they came, and they put the impression in her mind of an immense whale straining stars, planets, living beings into its gullet, shearing them from existence. They want Sadie to lead them back through the apport, so they may become gods, and join them herself in the Godfold. Instead she stands up from the Nölmyna, sacrificing reunion with Ben to defeat this annihilating Universe.

She patiently disassembles the chair to its smallest bits. After all, she’s inspected the Universe and found a dangerous structural defect. Luckily, she can patch this thin spot with the apport’s pieces. The police come with a warrant and make a big mess tearing out drywall, digging in the basement, looking for nonexistent bodies.

Never mind. As Sadie’s catchphrase on HHHI promised, “It’s nothing you can’t fix!”

What’s Cyclopean: The Nölmyna chair—or rather, its name—sounds “like something that had crept from an eldritch tomb long lost beneath the deserts’ shifting sands.”

Libronomicon: Sadie and Itzie swapped Goosebumps books as kids.

The Degenerate Dutch: Officer Pigott “would love it if just once, I got a call on a strong-arm robbery and it was the little old White lady who’d shaken Malik down. But the fact is it never is.” And that’s why he hasn’t called the emergency room to see if they’ve got the young black guy who disappeared.

When Itzie is actually on this plane of existence, he enjoys messing with people’s racist expectations: getting pitches accepted while execs are “busy being not-racist,” creating a hate-watchable TV show in which Sadie regularly demolishes the claims of a medium “and her regrettable spirit guide, ‘Chief Stonefeather’.” It helps him avoid the antisemitism.

Anne’s Commentary

My ever knowledgeable friend, Carl Kolchak, informs me that it is very dangerous to mess with IKEA. Not long ago, he went to the company’s homebase in Älmhult, Sweden, to investigate claims that if you paired a pentagonal mirror with the MALM dressing table, Bloody Mary would appear in the glass without being summoned and threaten to claw your eyes out if you didn’t purchase more IKEA merchandise worth exactly 666 kronor (about $74 US) every day for one year. He was in short order chased out of the country by sorcerously animated IKEA Sagolek troll dolls (the 19 inch variety!)

David Erik Nelson was wise to name his chair the ÖLEI Nölmyna, which no reader (however litigious or sorcerous) could possibly perceive as a sly reference to the IKEA Nölmyra chair. The Nölmyra was an IKEA staple for over a decade. Hipsters like Sadie’s husband considered its minimalist lightweight design “cool” and “stylish.” Those who bought it, butt unsat, often termed it a “short-sit” chair. These buyers were probably trying to save face. Many other buyers found the Nölmyra downright uncomfortable.

From the first, Sadie’s sharp eye for malfunctioning structure pegged the Nölmyna as ugly, awful. She got nasty vibes from its very name; to her, it sounded like “something that had crept from an eldritch tomb.” After a mere fifteen seconds on the chair’s mesh seat, Ben rejected it with a pungently unequivocal review: “Their website’s right: this chair does indeed ‘reimagine comfort’—in much the same way Jeffrey Dahmer reimagined charcuterie.”

About this ÖLEI company. I checked to see if olei is a Swedish word. It’s not, but in English, the acronym OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding, which translates to Objektlänkning och inbäddning in Swedish. It’s a technical function that transfers and shares (links or embeds) data among applications. Hmm. Sound like something the Nölmyna apport could be up to?

It strikes me as very curious that the apport linking our planet (or at least Cincinnati) with an annihilating Universe is none other than the Nölmyna that Sadie’s Ben craved so strongly. Why this object? Why a chair instead of a doorway of some sort, or if it had to be a chair, why this chair?

With Carl’s ever-insightful collaboration, I’ve come up with this hypothesis. The best visualization of the Universe that Sadie can glean from the now assimilated Itzie and Pigott is that it’s an immense baleen whale eternally filter-feeding on stars, planets, living beings, well, everything. Maybe it’s a kind of Anti-Universe feeding on the Universe-Universe? Effectively, it’s God. Apparently, it creates auxiliary gods to deal with newly accessed “prey.” Collectively, God and the gods form the Godfold which Sadie may join.

Could Sadie be the Universe’s chosen agent on Earth? Or at least a primary candidate? If so, what better way to attract her than with an apport-portal emblematic of one of her favorite memories from her short marriage to Ben: the trip to ÖLEI to try out the Nölmyna.

It was either the Nölmyna or the in-store meatballs they consumed after passing on the chair. Kind of hard to argue for a meatball-apport over a chair-apport. How does the Universe (or this particular predatory universe?) know to bait Sadie with a Nölmyna? Either it has access to Sadie’s mind or to Ben’s “indestructible” soul, already absorbed into itself. Like all souls?

The point is that although the apport-chair in Itzie’s apartment can slurp in people other than Sadie, she’s special. She can slip into the “whale’s” mouth without immediately getting caught in its baleen plates — as far as the story takes us, she can seat and unseat herself at will. Once drawn into the Universe, she can choose between “collapsing into her best beloved” and “saving this ugly, petty world.”

Where the Universe may have made a fatal error was in underestimating how essential is Sadie’s drive to fix things, whether it’s a ghost-mimic grumbling pipe or a hazardously thinning spot in the membrane between planes of existence.

Call her Fix-It Felicia, I guess.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I am terrified of IKEA. Or rather, I’m terrified in IKEA, whenever someone drags me there on such tenuous excuses as “we need an affordable bedframe.” It’s an endless labyrinth in which one’s companions could easily wander off forever, leaving the safety of the narrow path to vanish from known realms. And just when you think you might escape, you turn the corner and find yourself in yet another room of dishware.

My favorite pseudo-IKEA horror is Nino Cipri’s Finna, which finds horror in the store itself. But now I have to welcome a new contender: where I usually relax once I make it home with my bedframe, Nelson suggests that the militant mundanity of Nordic Modern furniture is itself a violation of the space-time continuum. Maybe I’ll get my next bed somewhere else.

Another growing literary tradition is the ghost story about a ghost-hunting show. Its lineage grows directly from earlier stories in which ghost hunters, skeptical or otherwise, find more than they bargained for. John Montague would 100% have streamed the Hill House happenings on TikTok if that had been an option. Sarah Pinsker’s Haunt Sweet Home follows the filming directly; Sadie has long since left Haunted House Home Inspectors due to stalkers (while Itzie went on to a whole sequence of follow-up shows). The important part is a want-to-believe skeptic or two, and the moment something breaks through their skepticism.

Sadie’s role on HHHI was the certified home inspector who undermined “hauntings”—who found the CO leak, picked up the subsonic vibrations from the old furnace, assured tenants that “It’s nothing you can’t fix.”

What pulls this all together for me is that Sadie and Itzie are Jewish—Jews of Color, in fact, their lives shaped by people not knowing what to make of them or which stereotypes to apply. (Except for Officer Pigott, who always knows which stereotypes to apply. At least until he achieves enlightenment.) Their approach to woo-hunting seems very Jewish: lots of arguments, reading and watching and analyzing lots of sources, and ultimately focused on the practicalities of solving the actual problem. 

Sadie, in particular, is practical in her ethics, even when her heart is screaming. One of the central tenets of Judaism (variety: modern, progressive) is Tikkun Olam: the repair of the world. The universe is created unfinished (or breaks in some fashion after initial creation), and it’s our responsibility to put the pieces back together. You can approach that from a mystical, kabbalistic angle, or from a pragmatic social justice angle, or both at once. Itzie falls through the chair and finds mystical inspiration, union, and a starting point for joining the “godfold” that can fix (or “fix”) the universe once and for all. Sadie, I think, is able to get out of the chair because her Tikkun attitude is humbler, more cautious, and not convinced that anything that feels so wrong can be good for our “ugly, petty world.”

So she chooses the repair she can manage with her toolbox over recreating reality with her BFF and husband. It’s a hell of a sacrifice, quiet and practical and unlikely to garner medals. She found a dangerous structural deficiency, and she repaired it. All the rest is commentary.  

Good for her.

Next week, Good Stab begins his story in chapters 3-4 of Buffalo Hunter Hunter.