The Seers’ Table April 2025

Kate Maruyama Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee

Linda Addison Recommends:

Pedro Iniguez is a horror and science-fiction writer from Los Angeles, California. He is a Rhysling Award finalist and a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

His fiction and poetry has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Never Wake: An Anthology of Dream Horror, Shadows Over Main Street Volume 3, Qualia Nous Vol. 2, A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, Worlds of Possibility, Infinite Constellations, Tiny Nightmares, Shortwave Magazine, Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, Space and Time Magazine, and Savage Realms Monthly, among others.

Apart from leading writing workshops and speaking at several colleges, he has also been a sensitivity reader and has ghostwritten for award-winning apps and online clients.

His SF poetry collection Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future, was released in 2024 from Space Cowboy Books. His horror fiction collection, Fever Dreams of a Parasite, explores the politics of inequality through the use of symbolism and metaphor, out in 2025 from publisher Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Recommended Reading: Fever Dreams of a Parasite released March 2025

An excerpt from the story The Body Booth:

“Now,” Francis said, holding up a hand, “are you sure you’re ready to see this? It’s pretty sick shit.”

Yazmina Mejia scowled. On more than one occasion she’d had to remind her editor that as a journalist in Ciudad Juárez, she’d seen every grotesquery one could imagine; cartel beheading videos, corpses dangling from freeway overpasses, scores of mutilated women pulled up from shallow graves. But that was a different life in a different place.

“You already know I can handle it,” she said, adjusting her body as she sat in the chair across his desk. The furniture wasn’t made to accommodate a pregnant woman. Not this late into a pregnancy, anyway.

Francis nodded, tapped the screen, and slid his phone across the desk. The candid video, which Yazmina presumed was recorded on a cheap burner phone, began with a pixelated low-angle shot of about a dozen men in tuxedos, their faces hidden by three-holed balaclavas. They sipped martinis and murmured amongst themselves in hushed tones. A few looked at something offscreen and gasped, their exposed mouths contorted in shock. The shot panned upward to reveal them crowding what appeared to be an old phone booth lit by a pair of overhead ceiling lamps.

… A canvas of pink connective tissue lined the ceiling and every pane of glass, throbbing to the tempo of a heartbeat. The camera approached the side of the booth where Yazmina could now make out thin purple blood vessels snaking along its walls. The flesh had a slick, wet sheen, like the insides of someone’s stomach.

A hand stretched into the frame, flashed a scalpel, then disappeared from view. There came a deep grunt followed by the pinging of metal hitting the floor. The phone shifted between hands before a bloodied palm pressed against the wall of meat. Like little tongues, hundreds of fine hairs wriggled from porous crypts in the flesh-wall and lapped up its scarlet offering.

Yazmina winced and slid the phone back across the table before covering her mouth with one hand and cupping her belly with the other. “Is this some sick joke? Who sent this to you?”

“Anonymous text.”

“Is it real?”

“Don’t know. I want you to look into it.”

Follow Iniguez at: site: https://pedroiniguezauthor.com/; facebook: pedro.iniguez.7; BluSky: @pedroiniguez.bsky.social; Instagram: @pete_the_sneak

And

Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet.
Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, as well as dozens of standalone short stories and poems.

Loteria, which was her MFA in Writing thesis at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was re-released to praise with Esquire calling it one of the ‘Best Horror Books of 2023.’ Santa Muerte and The Missing, her young adult horror novels were each nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was nominated for an Elgin Award. Into the Forest and All the Way Through was nominated for an Elgin Award and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Children of Chicago was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in a Novel and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery. Crime Scene won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. The Shoemaker’s Magician has been released to praise with Library Journal awarding it a starred review. Her novel The Forgotten Sisters was released by Thomas and Mercer in 2024 and is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Her latest novel, Vanishing Daughters, released by Thomas and Mercer, March 2025:
A haunted woman stalked by a serial killer confronts the horrors of fairy tales and the nightmares of real life in a breathtaking novel of psychological suspense by this Bram Stoker Award–winning author. It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side.

Recommended Reading: Vanishing Daughters (Thomas and Mercer, March 2025)

CHAPTER 1 (opening excerpt)

“Keys and gates and locks and thorns,” I say. “But what’s my name?”

I’m seated at the edge of my bed. My heart is racing and my hands are twisted around the comforter, as if grasping this fabric will keep me grounded and safe somehow. I did it again. I woke myself up screaming.

I don’t know what happens in those moments; all I know is my body jerks, and I sit up quickly and scream.

Now I am awake and staring out the window, trying to piece together what that was. Was it a nightmare? Something else? These episodes started happening the night she died. I turn to the pink dream journal beside my bed and the white pen. I pick them both up, open to a new page, and write the date at the top:

December 1

I woke up again. It’s 1:43 a.m. I feel scared. Like I want to cry. I can’t remember what I
was dreaming about.

I set the pen down on the bed beside me and flip to previous pages; they are all the same. Dates and times. Waking up in a panic. Unable to recount what it was that caused the terror and racing heart.

The only thing I can think of is that this is yet another symptom of grief.

Follow Pelayo at: https://cinapelayo.com/; Bluesky: @cynthiapelayo.bsky.social; Instagram: cynthiapelayoauthor; Linktree: https://linktr.ee/cynthiapelayoauthor

Photo credit: Magdalena Iskra

Kate Maruyama recommends :

Eugenia Triantafyllou is a Greek author and artist with a flair for dark things.

Her work has won the Shirley Jackson Award and has been nominated for the Ignyte, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find her stories in Reactor.com, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, and other venues. Her novelette Joanna’s Bodies was published on Psychopomp.

She currently lives in Athens with a boy and a dog.

Recommended reading: novelette: Joanna’s Bodies

The place smells like a gluten crematorium. Eleni runs to the kitchen and opens the window but it does little to help. Joanna has burned the pancakes and with them the pan that’s currently swimming in soapy water. The pan that Eleni will need to find and replace with a similar one. She hates when Joanna does this. She knows the rules. She knows they are meant to protect Eleni and Joanna and the person whose body Joanna rents and she still does stuff like this. Whatever. They’ll be out of here soon.

“I am sorry.” Joanna’s voice is barely a whisper under the sound of the jock’s screams when Megan Fox, as Jennifer, dislocates her jaw and snatches him with her shark-edged teeth. “When it starts, I can’t concentrate.”

Joanna’s telling the truth. It’s hard for her to do anything when the body she inhabits starts breaking down. Looking at her, Eleni figures it’s not too long now. They’ve got maybe another week before she needs to evacuate. And that’s being generous. When too much time has passed—and that time is different for each person she inhabits—the body looks like a bodysuit a couple sizes too big. The flesh feels detached from the skeleton when Eleni rests a hand on Joanna, like it’s sliding off in slow motion. It’s at those times that Eleni can see the ghost of a face swimming under the flesh. Sometimes that face is slightly to the side of where the actual face is, but sometimes it’s in other places, the neck, the small of the back, the stomach. It freaks her the hell out. Eleni usually gets Joanna to leave earlier than that, leave the person in as close-to-mint condition as possible. This is what they have agreed on.

Follow her on Instagram @eugeniatriantafyllou or @foxesandroses.bsky.social or at her website: https://eugeniatriantafyllou.com/

Nicole D. Sconiers recommends:

Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana author whose short fiction has appeared in Africa Risen, The Best of World SF Volume 1, Clarkesworld, Terraform, Africanfuturism Anthology, and is forthcoming in Chiral Mad 5 and other publications. She is a 2017 Rhysling Award nominee and a 2011 Bessie Head Short Story Award winner.

Tlotlo obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Botswana and won an award for design architecture. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University.

Tlotlo is a Caine Prize finalist. Her novella, The Silence of the Wilting Skin, is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist and was shortlisted for a 2021 Nommo Award. Womb City is Tlotlo’s debut adult novel.

Womb City is a fearless Africanfuturist horror novel that explores motherhood, identity and the surveillance state. Nelah is anxious to have a child although she’s trapped in the confines of a microchipped life. She’s stuck in a marriage of convenience to Eli, a policeman who monitors not only her finances but also her thoughts. Tensions flare in their relationship as they await the arrival of their daughter growing in a Wombcubator. One night after a car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime, hoping she can keep one last secret.

Recommended reading: Womb City (Erewhon Books, 2024)

Excerpt from Womb City:

Elifasi shakes his head. It takes two hours of him scrolling through my memory files as I pass time by fiddling with the hologram 3D design for a museum that my firm will be presenting to a client this week. But I can’t concentrate. I stare at him and wonder if every marriage is like ours: microchipped wives watching our husbands disembowel our thoughts and memories, dissecting our every infraction, interrogating us about our glances, our clothes, our conversations. Monitoring us for undetected crimes. Invading our privacy for the sake of public safety. My nails dig deep into my skin as a scream roils inside my throat—the scream, afraid to get out. We’re not only losing the power of our bodies, we’re losing the privacy our minds. What will be taken next for the sake of safety? This microchip protects our city, but it’s the husbands’, the city’s, the government’s tool to get inside us. My husband has the upper hand in our marriage, because I’m the one with a criminal body.

He stares at me, smiling, unaware of the volcano erupting within me. These intimate sessions mutilate my sense of independence; in this murdered church of my body, every molecule is a screaming prisoner.

Follow Tlotlo Tsamaase on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tlotlotsamaase/
And Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tlotlotsamaase.bsky.social