The Seers’ Table February 2018
Linda Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community
February contains National Pizza Day, so why not snack and read!
Janet Holden recommends
C.J. Tudor lives in Nottingham, England, with her partner and three-year-old daughter. Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over, and dog walker. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much. The Chalk Man is her first novel.
Recommended Reading: The Chalk Man – A riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut that weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry, and will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending.
In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank … until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Man is the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.
Check out more at: https://www.facebook.com/CJTudorOfficial/ .
Kate Maruyama recommends
Peternelle van Arsdale is a book editor who never thought she’d write a book, until one day she had a glimmer of an idea that became her first novel, The Beast Is an Animal. She lives in New York City.
Recommended Reading: The Beast is an Animal – Alys was seven the first time she saw the soul eaters. These soul eaters are twin sisters who were abandoned by their father and slowly grew into something not quite human. And they feed off of human souls. When her village was attacked, Alys was spared and sent to live in a neighboring village. There the devout people created a strict world where fear of the soul eaters—and of the Beast they believe guides them—rule village life. But the Beast is not what they think he is. And neither is Alys.
Inside, Alys feels connected to the soul eaters, and maybe even to the Beast itself. As she grows from a child to a teenager, she longs for the freedom of the forest. And she has a gift she can tell no one, for fear they will call her a witch. When disaster strikes, Alys finds herself on a journey to heal herself and her world. A journey that will take her through the darkest parts of the forest, where danger threatens her from the outside—and from within her own heart and soul.
“A dark atmospheric fantasy debut … achingly poetic.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“A swift and compelling read that will be popular with fantasy and retold–fairy tale readers.” (Booklist)
“Rock-solid setting and a Salem witch trial–like culture ground readers in this slow-moving but psychologically intense fantasy … Van Arsdale sets up her dominoes so that when the first is finally knocked over, subsequent events cascade the story forward in a rush of energy through to the final showdown.” (Horn Book)
Visit her at PeternelleVanArsdale.com.
Lauren Salerno recommends
Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He is the first Iraqi to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which he won in 2014 for Frankenstein in Baghdad. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. He was born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he still lives.
Recommended Reading: Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel. From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by “Baghdad’s new literary star” (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.
Linda Addison recommends
Kinitra D. Brooks is the Ricardo Romo Endowed Chair of the Honors College and Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests include contemporary African American and Afro-Caribbean literature, black feminism, and horror studies. Her monograph is Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Currently, she is working on a book-length exploration of visual renderings of monstrous black women tentatively titled, Divinely Monstrous: Black Women Conjuring the Grotesque in Popular Culture. She is also co-editing a volume on black women and horror entitled Towards a Black Women’s Horror Aesthetic: Critical Frameworks with Susana M. Morris and Linda Addison. She has published articles in African American Review, Obsidian, and FEMSPEC.
Recommended Reading: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror highlights the unique position of black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by black feminist theory.
Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary.
Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.
Other work: Dr. Brooks has co-edited Sycorax’s Daughters, a volume of short horror fiction written by African-American women writers, with horror writer Linda Addison and Dr. Susana Morris, and published by Cedar Grove Publishing.
Read more about her work at: http://www.kinitradbrooks.com.
