The Seers’ Table March 2018
Kate Jonez, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community
Now that spring has arrived, it’s time to freshen up your reading list with these excellent suggestions. What’s that? It’s not spring where you live? You’ll love these suggestions even more!
Linda Addison recommends
Wrath James White is a former world-class heavyweight kickboxer, a professional kickboxing and mixed martial arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print. Wrath is the author of such extreme horror classics as The Resurrectionist (now a major motion picture titled COME BACK TO ME), Succulent Prey, and its sequel Prey Drive, Yaccub’s Curse, 400 Days of Oppression, Sacrifice, Voracious, To The Death, The Reaper, Skinzz, Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town, The Book of a Thousand Sins, His Pain, Population Zero, and many others. He is the co-author of Teratologist co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, Something Terrible co-written with his son Sultan Z. White, Orgy of Souls co-written with Maurice Broaddus, Hero and The Killings both co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, Poisoning Eros co-written with Monica J. O’Rourke, among others. Also, D.O.A. II – Extreme Horror Collection with Jack Ketchum, J.F. Gonzalez, and others (Blood Bound Books). Contact him at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wrathjw?fref=ufi; Twitter: @WrathJW.
His current book is If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse, a poetry collection (Clash Books, February 2018). Wrath is known for his hardcore writing. He is also a master poet, comfortable in many forms. In this book he plays well with haikus, chokes, etc., and also includes a couple of short stories. Each piece purrs/screams his sharp-edged, unflinching sensual/savage songs.
From It’s A Rainy Day:
“I slide out of you
Slide down your body
Between your thighs
And devour your delicate flower”
From Untitled #2:
“Enthralled by your flesh
In love with you utterly
your body, mind, and spirit
and if you died tomorrow
I would eat your corpse”
Kate Maruyama recommends
Kirsten Imani Kasai believes that poetry and fiction should be challenging, emotionally stimulating, and intellectually nourishing. An avowed feminist, she’s dedicated to her mission of celebrating literature as a change agent that can push us beyond our comfort zones, break us open, and put us back together.
A mixed (black and white) woman with Southern and Midwestern roots, whose father and grandfathers were ministers, she’s inspired to explore cultural and theological intersections through her writing. Her goals are to redefine prevalent cultural images of women and motherhood; to question the nature of gender roles; to establish a feminine vision of the future not rooted in technological alienation and destruction; and, of course, to write killer stories that satisfy our natural human lust for action, sex, love, violence, and intrigue.
Her areas of expertise and interest include: women’s and feminist literature, utopias and dystopias in pop culture and literature, the Hero’s Journey, genre fiction (historical, dark fantasy and sci-fi, speculative fiction, horror and Gothic), literary and commercial fiction, fairy tales, mythology, folklore, and hybrid, experimental and multi-genre prose. Kirsten is the founder and publisher of Body Parts Magazine: The Journal of Horror & Erotica.
She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and certification in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and lives with her partner and children in California.
The House of Erzulie tells the eerily intertwined stories of an ill-fated young couple in the 1850s and the troubled historian, who discovers their writings in the present day.
Emilie St. Ange, the daughter of a Creole slave-owning family in Louisiana, rebels against her parents’ values by embracing spiritualism, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Isidore, her biracial, French-born husband, is an educated man, who is horrified by the brutalities of plantation life and becomes unhinged by an obsessive affair with a notorious New Orleans voodoo practitioner.
Emilie’s and Isidore’s letters and journals are interspersed with sections narrated by Lydia Mueller, an architectural historian whose fragile mental health further deteriorates as she reads.
Imbued with a sense of the uncanny and the surreal, The House of Erzulie also alludes to the very real horrors of slavery and makes a significant contribution to the literature of the U.S. South, particularly the tradition of the African-American Gothic novel.
Janet Joyce Holden recommends
Kea Wilson received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she lives and works as a bookseller. We Eat Our Own is her first novel.
We Eat Our Own: When a nameless, struggling actor in 1970s New York gets the call that an enigmatic director wants him for an art film set in the Amazon, he doesn’t hesitate; he flies to South America, no questions asked. He quickly realizes he’s made a mistake. He’s replacing another actor who quit after seeing the script—a script the director now claims doesn’t exist. The movie is over budget. The production team seems headed for a breakdown. The air is so wet that the celluloid film disintegrates.
But what the actor doesn’t realize is that the greatest threat might be the town itself, and the mysterious shadow economy that powers this remote jungle outpost. Entrepreneurial Americans, international drug traffickers, and M-19 guerrillas are all fighting for South America’s future—and the groups aren’t as distinct as you might think. The actor thought this would be a role that would change his life. Now he’s worried if he’ll survive it.
Inspired by a true story from the annals of 1970s Italian horror film, and told in dazzlingly precise prose, We Eat Our Own is a resounding literary debut, a thrilling journey behind the scenes of a shocking film and a thoughtful commentary on violence and its repercussions.
Kate Jonez recommends
Linda Nagata is a Nebula- and Locus-award-winning author. Her more recent work includes short fiction “Nahiku West,” runner-up for the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the novel The Red: First Light, a near-future military thriller that was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Though best known for science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven Web sites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.
The Last Good Man: Scarred by war, in pursuit of truth: Army veteran True Brighton left the service when the development of robotic helicopters made her training as a pilot obsolete. Now she works at Requisite Operations, a private military company established by friend and former Special Ops soldier Lincoln Han. ReqOp has embraced the new technologies. Robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence are all tools used to augment the skills of veteran warfighters-for-hire. But the tragedy of war is still measured in human casualties, and when True makes a chance discovery during a rescue mission, old wounds are ripped open. She’s left questioning what she knows of the past, and resolves to pursue the truth, whatever the cost. The Last Good Man is a powerful, complex, and very human tale.
