Linda D. Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community
You can see any of The Seers’ Table posts since inception (March 2016) by going to the HWA main page and selecting the menu item “HWA Publications / Blogs / Seers’ Table”.
Kate Maruyama recommends:
Catherine Kuo is an Asian American writer who lived and worked in Taiwan and Japan for several years before returning to the United States. She graduated from the University of California, Davis, where she was selected as one of the winners of the university’s 2010-2011 “Prized Writing” competition. She is an HWA member and participated in the HWA mentorship program. Her short stories can be found in the Bloodless anthology, published by Sliced Up Press, Monstrous Futures, published by Dark Matter Ink, and Dark Corners of the Old Dominion: A Virginia Horrors Anthology from Death Knell Press. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Recommended Reading: “The Bride of Dream Lake” featured in Dark Corners of the Old Dominion: A Virginia Horrors Anthology
Excerpt:
The girl motioned for Bianca to follow her before turning and ambling away. Without thinking, she slipped off her heels, staggered to her feet, and ran after the girl. The shouts of the others faded away as Bianca limped off the path and through the maze of stalagmites, her dress catching on the smaller protrusions, tearing the delicate lace. The girl ducked under a massive formation of flowstone, a spectacular cream curtain formed by years of flowing water and layers of calcite deposits. She waited for Bianca to catch up before disappearing into a low tunnel behind the flowstone.
As soon as Bianca got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel, she felt a blanket of comfortably warm air envelop her…
Catherine can be found on Bluesky @catherinekuo531.bsky.social
Nicole Sconiers recommends:
Helen Power is an academic librarian living in Saskatoon, Canada who’s obsessed with all things horror. She holds degrees in forensic science, environmental studies, and library science, an eclectic background that has helped with both her job and with her writing.
Her work appears in Suspense magazine and Dark Helix Press’s Canada 150 anthology, Futuristic Canada. Her stories range from comedy to horror with just a hint of dystopia in between. Her debut novel, The Ghosts of Thorwald Place, won gold in the IBPA’s Benjamin Franklin Awards for Best New Voice: Fiction.
Her second novel Phantom explores issues of addiction and class and asks the morbid question: Would you sell your hand for a million dollars? This is an offer Regan “Roz” Osbourne can’t refuse. She’s broke, battling alcoholism and no one is taking her artwork seriously. So when a mysterious stranger offers seven figures in exchange for her left hand, she reluctantly accepts.
Immediately following the amputation, Roz is racked with excruciating phantom limb pain. Desperate for relief, she enrolls in an experimental drug trial. But this drug has a bizarre side effect―she develops a psychic connection to her missing limb and experiences troubling sensations that leave her on edge. Roz soon discovers her city’s long-dormant Phantom Strangler is on the hunt again. She fears the serial killer is the recipient of her hand and is using it to kill.
Recommended reading: Phantom (CamCat Publishing, 2023)
Excerpt from Phantom:
I was now forced to confront the questions and doubts that had been lurking in the shadowy recesses of my mind this past week. Could it be that the Phantom Strangler had my hand? That he was using my hand to kill? Logically, I knew that this was impossible, on so many different levels. How could I be feeling the sensations of a killer who was miles away? Unless . . .
I sat bolt upright. What if the Ryofen was somehow giving me a psychic link to my severed limb? That would explain why I could feel what my hand was doing, and why the sensations seemed to coincide with when I had taken a pill…
I lay in my bed, unable to summon sleep. If the Phantom Strangler was wearing my hand, they would have had it surgically attached. Was the science even there yet? I rolled onto my side and grabbed my cell phone, which had been charging on the floor beside my bed. I opened the internet browser. I made a search: “hand transplants.”
Thousands of results filled the screen. I clicked on the first and skimmed the article. By 2022, dozens of successful hand transplants had taken place, all from deceased or brain-dead donors who were carefully screened and deemed to be perfect matches for the recipients. The recipients, if their immune systems didn’t reject the new limb, could have functionality and sensation, though it wasn’t guaranteed.
I then made the mistake of scrolling through images. I quickly clicked away from the Frankenstein-like monstrosities. My breath hitched as I imagined my hand crudely stitched to someone else’s arm. The thought was terrifying. I looked down at my stump again, a stump that had healed remarkably quickly. Whoever removed my hand had technology or practices that were far more advanced than commonly known science. Who’s to say that the person now wearing my hand didn’t heal remarkably as well? What if the hand looked like it belonged? What if there wasn’t even a scar?
Follow Helen on FaceBook: helenpowerauthor and Instagram: Powerlibrarian
Kari Wolfe recommends:
Yvette Tan: known as the Queen of Philippine Horror Stories, Yvette Tan’s stories, “Kulog” and “Sidhi,” both in her first short fiction collection Waking the Dead, won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in different categories in 2003 and a Nick Joaquin Literary Ward in 2024 for her story “Horror Vacui.” Not only does she write short stories, but she also wrote the screenplay for the 2017 independent film Ilawod. She co-wrote the libretto for Opera: A Rebirth in Arabesque, a ballet based on the work of artist Gabriel Barredo, with Erwin Romulo which was performed by Ballet Philippines in the CCP Main Theatre as part of Art Fair 2016.
Besides horror, she is also passionate about researching paranormal phenomena as well as agriculture and food security. When asked how a horror writer became interested in growing food, she says, “Farmers and horror writers both keep the apocalypse at bay.”
Recommended reading: from her most recent collection, Seek Ye Whore and Other Stories(Anvil Publishing Inc., 2023)
Excerpt from Lost Girl:
You never forget the first time you get lost. I was three. It wasn’t anything big or dramatic. I simply lost track of my mom in a mall. She was looking at blouses and didn’t feel my tiny hand slip from her normally firm grip, didn’t notice me walk away, looking for the toy store on the same floor.
I have always had a very bad sense of direction. My husband, who can find a place based on vague directions from random passersby, has stories about how I have gotten myself lost in different countries, various malls, and several neighborhoods, including our own. But this wasn’t the same.
That first time, as I headed to what I thought was the toy store, dodging the usual chaos of Virra Mall on a Saturday, I ducked into a hallway thinking it was a short cut. But as I did, there was a sudden silence. A silence so loud there was a ringing in my ears, the sound gone so fast that air rushing to fill that void seemed as loud as a gong. Gone were the buyers jostling past each other amidst vendors hawking their wares in loud voices.
I was in a hallway, a long one that seemed to stretch down to infinity. There were doors to the left and the right, interspersed with shelves, all of them leading to the dim glow of light at the end. I don’t think I was scared, but I do remember feeling like everything was closing in on me, the air thick and humid, the doors—some closed, some open—looming, the shelves skewed at weird angles, threatening to fall over.
Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @yvette_tan and on Facebook at @yvettetanauthor.
