Kate Maruyama, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community

Lauren Salerno recommends

Justina Ireland enjoys dark chocolate, dark humor, and is not too proud to admit that she’s still afraid of the dark. She lives with her husband, kid, and dog in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows.

Recommending: Dread Nation. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville—derailing the War Between the States and changing America forever. In this new nation, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Reeducation Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

Contact: JustinaIreland.com

Kate Maruyama recommends

A veteran bookseller and librarian, Courtney Alameda now spends her days writing thriller and horror novels. Her debut novel, Shutter, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award® and hailed as a “standout in the genre” by School Library Journal. Her forthcoming novels include the science fiction/horror mashup, Pitch Dark (Macmillan/Feiwel & Friends, 2018), and Seven Deadly Shadows, an urban fantasy set in Japan, and co-authored with Valynne Maetani (HarperTeen, 2018).

Courtney holds a degree in English literature with an emphasis in creative writing. She is represented by John M. Cusick of Folio Literary. A northern California native, she now resides in Utah with her husband, a legion of books, and a tiny five-pound cat with a giant personality.

Member HWA, SFWA, SCBWI; and SDCC Creative Professional.

Recommending, Shutter: Lock, stock, and lens, she’s in for one hell of a week. Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat—a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film. She’s aided by her crew: Oliver, a techno-whiz and the boy who developed her camera’s technology; Jude, who can predict death; and Ryder, the boy Micheline has known and loved forever. When a routine ghost hunt goes awry, Micheline and the boys are infected with a curse known as a soulchain. As the ghostly chains spread through their bodies, Micheline learns that if she doesn’t exorcise her entity in seven days or less, she and her friends will die. Now pursued as a renegade agent by her monster-hunting father, Leonard Helsing, she must track and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she’s faced before … or die trying.

Shutter by Courtney Alameda is a thrilling horror story laced with an irresistible romance.

Contact: CourtneyAlameda.com

Linda Addison recommends

Kenesha Williams is an independent author, speaker, and founder/Editor-in-Chief of Black Girl Magic Lit Magazine.

She took to heart the advice, “If you don’t see a clear path for what you want, sometimes you have to make it yourself,” and created a speculative fiction literary magazine featuring characters that were representative of the diversity of Black womanhood. She has happily parlayed her love for the weird and the macabre into Black Girl Magic Literary Magazine, finding the best in undiscovered talent in Speculative Fiction.

A gifted communicator, Kenesha has been a panelist and speaker at many conferences and events, as well as a guest on several podcasts. As an essayist, she has written for Time Magazine‘s imprint, Motto. Kenesha is also a screenwriter, who is in pre-production on a horror-based Web series and a short horror film. When she has free time, she spends it reading, writing, or using all her iPhone memory listening to a million podcasts. Kenesha was also the winner of the 2018 HWA Scholarship From Hell.

Check out her story, “Sweet Justice,” about a female Supernatural Private Investigator in the anthology Black Magic Women (Mocha Memoirs Press, LLC, 2018).

From “Sweet Justice”: “First pimps started disappearing, and when they reappeared, it was as gnarled and dried corpses in back alleys that no one should have been down anyway. No one knew what to make of the disappearances and subsequent almost mummified bodies, but no one really cared. Good riddance was the attitude. Then the Johns started to disappear. A few frantic 911 calls from housewives looking for their husbands, but still little fanfare … When they couldn’t find a single shred of evidence, and someone on the force with sense looked at the clues they did have, shriveled body, no mortal wounds, unspecified cause of death, they called upon me and my unique gifts.”

Williams story will carry you along to a satisfying, yet surprising conclusion. I look forward to more adventures with her Supernatural P.I.

Contact: Find out more about Williams at https://www.keneshawilliams.com/.

Andrew Wolter recommends

Daniel Stone writes from New York City where he was born and raised. He is the author of the urban horror novels The Absence of Light and Blood Kiss, the collaborative, stand-alone novella I Can Taste The Blood, and the short story collection Lovebites & Razorlines. In 2016, he was selected by readers to be included in Dread (The Best Horror of Grey Matter Press). He writes under a pseudonym to keep the wolves at bay.

Find him on Twitter and Instagram @SolitarySpiral.

Recommended: Lovebites & Razorlines. A compendium of thirteen unique nightmares. From the darkest parts of New York City to subterranean dreamscapes and clubs hidden away from the public, J. Daniel Stone‘s hypnotic prose guides you through the aberrant jungle of life’s seedy half. Inside we meet artists starving for attention, hungry shadows; we fall prey to disease, become entranced by psychedelic encounters, and learn from introspection far beyond anyone’s years. Lyrical philosophies plague the mind of a young pregnant woman not willing to have the baby. A young man longs to discover death, hoping to locate the mother that never loved him. Music is the key to putting a soul back in dead things. A couple must come to terms with recent HIV infection. A pair of artists feed off one another’s talents in order to understand the supernatural. A transsexual longs for the ultimate transformation.

Daniel Stone‘s characters question reality, challenge norms, and break down conventional barriers. They live on the fringe and are unapologetic about it. They destroy familiar tropes through poetry and painting, music and photography.

Lovebites & Razorlines is an anthem for the depraved and forgotten.

Contact: http://villipede.com/j-daniel-stone/