October 2026
Kari J. Wolfe, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee
The sole purpose of The Seers’ Table monthly column is to introduce HWA members to the work of underrepresented demographic writers and editors whose work might not otherwise be viewed, using the broadest definition of the word underrepresented to include, but not limited to, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabled and neurodiverse.
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”.
Nicole D. Sconiers recommends:
Jessica Gleason finds writing horror therapeutic. She often draws from her AAPI culture and lived experience to bring occult-flavored and slasherific horror to life.
If you look hard enough, you can catch her singing hair metal karaoke somewhere between Chicago and Milwaukee. Her daytime persona is a college English professor in the American Midwest.
Jessica was nominated for “Best of the Net” by Punk Monk in 2022. Her recent releases include Easy Bake Covenant (Burial Books), Damned Before Daylight (Cupid’s Arrow Publishing), and The Dangerous Miss Ventriloquist (Evil Cookie Publishing). Her next book, Playing Hooky (Burial Books), will be published in Fall 2026.
In Damned Before Daylight, Mage, an ambitious young professor, and Rave, a feisty bohemian copywriter, are dying to escape the monotony of their small Wisconsin town Meritville. After a night of barhopping, the friends wake up in a dank basement. Trapped. Without heartbeats. To their horror, they discover they were “turned” by a rogue vampire and initiated into the seedy supernatural community that has operated beneath their town for centuries.
Mage and Rave find themselves endowed with superhuman strength and teleportation powers. But their newfound abilities come with a price. They’re forced into the ranks of a powerful vampire family and thrust into a brutal turf war. As the conflict escalates, the undead duo must battle their growing bloodlust while clinging to the brittle shards of their humanity. Damned Before Daylight is a darkly humorous treatise on girl power, agency and the enduring bonds of sisterhood.
Recommended reading: Damned Before Daylight (Cupid’s Arrow Publishing, 2026)
~Excerpt~
“She is unbelievably strong. Her mind control powers rival my own, even when she is in a regular state. Add the power of the blood lust to the mix, and I was powerless to resist.” It sounded like Andrew was doing his best to reason with the master, but his best wasn’t quite enough.
“How is that even possible? The other does not have any sort of mental powers.”
“I do not know, Master.”
“And you let her drink your blood?”
“I can assure you, I didn’t mean for it to happen—”
“Andrew, it does not matter what you meant to do, but rather what you have done. Granting such potent blood to a fledgling vampire at this early stage of her transformation will undoubtedly amplify her abilities. If she possesses the strength you claim, it could potentially pose a threat to us. I refrained from feeding on my date, regardless of any other circumstances. The others within our community will sense the heightened power of your initiate and may perceive her as a threat, leading to potential disaster. You know this. In these delicate times, the emergence of a new influential figure could shift the balance in favor of our adversaries!”
“She will not betray us. She is mine … ours … yours, and she will stay that way.”
Follow Jessica on Instagram: @j.g.writes.
Kate Maruyama Recommends:
Erin Brown is a poet and author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction. Her debut novelette, “Garden of the Bloodpotter” can be found at Psychopomp Press.
She has been published in FIYAH Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Midnight and Indigo, The Deadlands, Eastover Press Rural Writers Anthology, the Escape Pod, and And One Day We Will Die: Neutral Milk Hotel anthology, Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, and many others. She is an editor on The Cookout Anthology which is coming soon from Android Press! Erin is a Voodoonauts Fellow and the 2022 recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship in Creative Writing. She was also shortlisted for Best New Weird 2022.
Erin is currently in an MFA program for Creative Writing at Mount St Mary’s University.
You can find her published works at https://ebrownwrites.com.
Recommended Reading: “Butter” Nightmare Magazine Issue 168, September 2026
~Excerpt~
Kayla wrenched the knob on the oven to turn off the heat. Her husband was at least an hour away, and everything else for the evening meal was easy enough to make. She grabbed up the black butter box and felt it lurch uncertainly in her hand, as if the contents were liquid, or some kind of wet shifting sand. Carrying it over to the cooled pan, she opened the box. Inside was a . . . substance. Far from the solid block of pale yellow butter she had been expecting, what was inside was more like an oily paste. The scent was meaty, salty, but not unpleasant—in fact, it made her a bit hungry. Well, she hadn’t eaten all day.
Maybe it was some kind of ghee. That would explain the strange lettering. She hoped the texture wouldn’t affect the cake much.
Kayla scooped up a large glop of the butter onto her fingers to oil the sides of the cake pan, and the world lurched. She was flung, stretched like taffy, joints popping, ears popping, until her body slammed onto the ground with a pain that shot through her legs and hips and up her spine to spike into her skull.
She was in a nightmare, a glaring green-yellow nightmare, shins scraping against rough yellow brickwork. Her arm was on the seat of some sort of chair, a hideous throne of old-pus-yellow leather padded seats set in onyx black. Her arm was moving, the skin of her grease-slicked fingers aching raw as they were forced in slow circles against the surface of the seat of the throne. She could not see who held her there, but she could not pull her arm away, and now her fingertips were in agony. Her hand ground into the seat, working against the rough yellow leather, rough as a cheese grater, that stretched across the seat of a large, ornately carved yellow and black throne.
Erin can be found at ebrownwrites.com, on Twitter @babblebrown, or on Bluesky @babblewocky.bsky.social.