The Seers’ Table December 2024
Kate Maruyama, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee.
We have some rich reading in time to buy gifts for friends, dig in!
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.”
Linda D. Addison recommends:
Ao-Hui Lin enjoys finding terror in the day-to-day of domestic life, particularly in motherhood, which is why she doesn’t want her children reading her fiction. The truth was frightening enough. When she’s not at her day job, writing AI software to take over the world, she can be found haunting the coffee shops of Chicago, Illinois.
Her work has appeared in various venues, including Drabblecast, Defenestration, Everyday Fiction, Jersey Devil Press, and the anthology Daughters of Icarus. Lin’s story, Housebound, available online through Drabblecast (10/4/2020), has an opening that won’t let you stop reading this weird dark tale.
Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 3 (Bleeding Edge Books, 2023) is an anthology containing the final, apocalyptic word in this groundbreaking series of small-town Lovecraftian terror. Lin’s story, “The Gift of Tongues,” tells the tale of a special baby, unlike any child you can imagine.
Recommended reading: “The Gift of Tongues” (Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 3).
An excerpt:
Pastor Paul comes to a final, shouted “Amen!”, which is answered by the crowd, and then for a second everyone is quiet. And in that moment of silence, Baby Agnes’s voice booms out, deeper than any baby’s voice should be.
It has a curious cadence, each syllable inflected as if it is meant to be a standalone sentence. Agnes has pulled herself to standing using the slats of the crib, and from her open mouth pours a litany of sounds, rising and falling, the glossolalia transfixing the audience. Old women fall to their knees, crying. Young men lay on the floor, shaking. Miss Annie, sitting in the front pew, turns to look at Myra, gives her a small nod and a meaningful look at the crib.
Miss Annie has explained that this is part of her duties, as if Myra hasn’t seen the ritual for all the years of her life. Myra stands and moves to the crib, picks up Agnes, who clenches her little baby fists and waves them around as she screams the incomprehensible words. A spectator might be tempted to laugh; Agnes has all the appearance of a tiny toddler raging at the loss of an ice cream cone. Myra carries the angry baby into the crowd, where the parishioners reach out to touch her dress with trembling hands. The two of them shuffle closer to those seated in the pews; Agnes strikes out with her tiny hands, balled into fists, knocking people across the face, in the eyes, snatching at hair and clothes with a strength shocking for one so little. An old man receives a blow across the face, knocking off his glasses, and he gasps, tottering to his feet and tossing his cane away. A young child is boxed on the ears and starts to scream, his mother crying as the child reacts to the commotion as if hearing it for the first time.
Follow Ao-Hui Lin at Bluesky: @aohuilin.bsky.social.
Geneve Flynn recommends:
Kyla Lee Ward, an award-winning author of horror and dark fantasy novels, short stories, and poetry, as well as roleplaying games. She’s also an actor and artist, a part-time medievalist, and hosts ghost tours in Sydney City. Kyla is the author of a recent novella, Those That Pursue Us Yet, and dark fiction collection, This Attraction Now Open Till Late. She is a winner of the Australian Shadows and Aurealis Awards, and a Bram Stoker Award® nominee and Ditmar Award finalist. She has been described as gothic, mystic, and esoteric, but perhaps her attraction to darkness and what can be found there is just a matter of having good night sight, and thereby noticing things other people don’t. Find out more at kylaward.com.
Recommended reading:
Excerpt from Those That Pursue Us Yet:
Wander jumps up from the tiny, tiny bed and flees into the hallway. Deep russets and purples stripe the floor. There on the wall is the link she used to get here: a mounted picture of small boats on a brown river. Every detail of prow and sail, the ripples of the water and even the clouds surrounding the moon are made of bamboo, slivered, pressed and inserted into the design like a fine parquet. Oh, she can go many places from here. And go she must, flee back to the studio where Roscoe waits beside her sleeping body, away from such madness as cannot possibly be real …
But then, she pauses. For the first time, she looks on her childhood home with adult eyes.
The hall runs behind her, past the door to her parents’ bedroom and the converted walk-in that became her own. She spent her adolescence sleeping next to the laundry, had been able to feel the dryer going through the wall. This house is small, barely larger than the studio, and the door at the end, through which the moonlight falls … well, what’s out there is a tenuous set of swings, that would probably be banned these days, a couple of cabbages and a fence. The border lies here no longer.
The living room is a treasury of dark jewels, barred to her by a forbiddance of solid glass, ice. It shatters at a touch and inside, everything is junk! Really, it’s all the crappiest kind of tourist bait from Bali, Tibetan flags and a salt crystal lamp obtained from some homewares shop, and a coffee table with brass inlay. She’s seen better in student squats! And as for the bamboo picture, for goodness sake…
The wall behind the picture has taken on the texture and contours of a massive plate of mould.
She tries to step backwards but her feet are sinking, deeper and deeper into the black stickiness that the carpet has become. She smells oranges but they are rotting. It is past the time for fleeing and no, she does not want to stay! She does not want to see!
She concentrates on her fear. Though she has no lungs, she gulps a breath and then another. Makes herself feel the terror in her body, an increased heart rate and tensing muscles. Makes herself tremble, makes herself feel the—
PAIN
So far back in her memories, a mere suggestion is not enough to wake her. It takes an external shock.
And Wander wakes.
She ricocheted into waking, the application of clamps to tender skin scorching down sleep-baffled nerves. The shock repeated itself at her wrists and ankles as she writhed, until Roscoe’s voice got through, until she felt his hands against her face and in her hair. His wonderful, soothing voice told her she was safe, she was here now, that he had waited until she began to toss and turn, then did as she had asked. Was she okay?
Slowly, she relaxed, though every muscle was now aching. She was naked and tied to the bed, once again drenched in sweat.
“Jesus,” he murmured, stroking her now between the clamps. “What the hell happened?”
“I went home,” she said.
“Wander, if the therapy … if you’re still having these nightmares, I don’t know that it’s working.”
Child.
“Oh, but it is,” she said. “And I need you to do more, now. More than I’ve ever asked before.”
Review for Those That Pursue Us Yet: “Kyla Lee Ward’s utterly original, powerful voice courses through this stunning book. I was held mesmerized by the language and by the story.” — Kaaron Warren, multi-award-winning author of Slights, The Grief Hole, and Sky.
Follow Kyla at Facebook: @kylaleeward, YouTube: @kylawtr, @kylaw.bsky.social
Author photo credit: Zak Campbell.
Kate Maruyama recommends:
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative-fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, which have been finalists for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Award, Locus Award, and Aurora Award. Her novellas have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Aurora Award, British Fantasy Award, Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. In 2022, she won the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for her novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight and the Aurora Award for her novella The Annual Migration of Clouds. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Her short fiction has appeared in print and audio venues, including Analog, Augur, Nightmare Magazine, Slate, Fireside Fiction, and PodCastle. In 2017, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her story “Willing” (Third Flatiron Press).
She is currently the 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and an Assistant Editor for the short audio science-fiction venue Escape Pod. Previously, she was a Capital City Press Featured Writer for 2019/2020 with the Edmonton Public Library. Her guest editing positions include novellas with Interstellar Flight Press and short fiction with Apparition Lit. She has judged short fiction competitions with CBC, Dream Foundry, and others.
Recommended Reading: Her latest novel, The Butcher of the Forest, out now from Tor.com.
Excerpt:
It was not yet dawn when they came for her.
Veris stumbled from her bed into an early-morning sea, deep blue light submerging the little house with no hint of sun; she swam, it seemed to the lamp in the hall, and lit it with a wavery half smothered match; she swam down the stairs.
The front door rattled in its frame with each blow, paints and shreds of wood flaking from it, as if the unseen callers were not knocking but rushing at it with a battering ram. It was locked from the inside, but the bolts and bars were beginning to give as she approached. She unlocked I hastily, cursing and fumbling the ancient keys, and threw it wide.
You can learn more about Premee at PremeeMohamed.com or follow her on Instagram and other locations @premeesaurus.
Kari J. Wolfe recommends:
A Bram Stoker Award nominee for short fiction, L.E. Daniels is an American author, poet, and editor living in Australia. Her novel, Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (Interactive Publications), is a Notable Work with the HWA’s Mental Health Initiative. Lauren co-edited Aiki Flinthart’s Relics, Wrecks and Ruins (CAT Press) with Geneve Flynn, winning the 2021 Aurealis Award, and with Christa Carmen, co-edited the 2022 Aurealis finalist, We Are Providence: Tales of Horror from the Ocean State (Weird House Press). She has served as a literary judge for Interactive Publications, Hawkeye Books, the Society of Women Writers, and the HWA.
Recent publications include “Silk” in Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster (Twisted Wing Productions) and “Hangman’s Coming” in Where the Silent Ones Watch (Hippocampus Press). Lauren’s personal essays appear in Holistic Horror, Quick Bites, and 34 Orchard. Her recent poetry is published in The Cozy Cosmic (Underland Press), Under Her Eye, and Mother Knows Best (Black Spot Books), with “Night Terrors” (HWA) a finalist for the 2022 Australian Shadows Award. Lauren directs Brisbane Writers Workshop.
Recommended Reading: “Darkness Repeats” in Monsters in the Mills, the anthology that she and Christa Carmen edited together this year. It’s about ancestral trauma, WWII, and is based on Daniels’s grandmother who worked in the New England mills making wool overcoats for the soldiers and a grand uncle who was a tank driver in Patton’s 3rd Army.
Excerpt:
December 1944
Ardennes Forest, South of Bastogne, Belgium
Joe scrambled low across the belly of the trench and grabbed the lapels of the German’s corpse. Milky pre-dawn darkness and thick fog blanketed him and Mike, the tank gunner, under stripped boughs of oak and willow. A dusting of snow fell across the capsized wreckage and flattened vehicles of yesterday’s skirmish, but the Nazi ambush had barely slowed the march of Patton’s Third Army to Bastogne.
Clawing at the stiff wool, Joe was past shivering now. Alternating waves of heat and chills swept beneath his cotton tank driver’s uniform. Inside the thin leather gloves, his fingers were numb. His shoulder screamed from the blow it had taken when a mine tore the treads from his tank.
After one night exposed under their Sherman, he and Mike, whose gashed thigh leaked through its wrapping, were blanched with frostbite. They were the only ones in their crew of five who’d survived the blast.
While Joe tugged at the German’s overcoat, Mike fumbled with the plank-frozen legs. The woods were crawling with Nazis and if they were caught stealing a coat, they’d be shot on sight.
In rising metallic light, Joe crouched and swept a sharp kick to the torso of the corpse to loosen where fabric, blood, and frozen slush had melded. With a crackle of ice, the body shifted. Mike splayed his hands, signaling to listen. Freezing cold, disoriented, and clumsy, they could easily attract a bullet.
Joe exhaled a slow mist at the ground, knowing that even a puff could reveal their position. He paused, then as one, the men continued their attempt to wrench the coat from the corpse. Peeling back the wool, Joe looked into the broken skull, gray and deep purple in this strange light.
A tap-tap-tap bounced in the fog.
The men hunched, looking only at each other.
Mike clung hard to the corpse’s legs.
Through the falling snow, another burst resounded.
Joe glanced upward and pointed. Mike followed his gaze. The dark shape of a large woodpecker flitted higher into an oak, the tree hanging in parts by twisted heartwood and bark.
Joe couldn’t help but consider it: Good wood for building.
Mike tugged on the soldier’s legs, a signal to keep going. They had to work faster. Dawn was lighting up the fog.
While Mike worked on the corpse’s boots, Joe tore the coat free and stared into what remained of the rictus grin of the German. He was young. Maybe eighteen? He had good teeth. His wool coat, riddled with sawdust and stiff with bodily fluid, felt fine and thick in Joe’s hands. “Danker shane, you bastard,” Joe whispered in a broad New England accent to the cadaver’s broken face and stuffed the coat down the front of his jacket. The son of Polish immigrants, he had never cared to learn much German.
Mike tore at the snowy laces but the boots didn’t budge. He was flagging so Joe motioned to quit and follow him.
Web site: https://www.brisbanewriters.com
