The Seers’ Table January 2018
Linda Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community
January is Self-Improvement Month—why not add new creative work to your life by exploring the following authors!
Kate Maruyama recommends
Owl Goingback served in the Air Force and is a former owner of a restaurant and lounge. He became a full-time writer in 1987 and since then has written numerous novels, children’s books, short stories, screenplays, and magazine articles.
His novel, Crota, won the Bram Stoker Award® for Best First Novel, and was one of four finalists in the Best Novel category. His novel, Darker Than Night, was also a Stoker Nominee for best novel of the year. Both books draw upon his Native American heritage to tell a story of supernatural suspense, as do his other novels Evil Whispers, Breed, and Shaman Moon.
Owl’s children’s books, Eagle Feathers and The Gift, have received critical acclaim from parents and teachers, and are currently used in numerous reading programs. Eagle Feathers is a Storytelling World Awards Honor Recipient.
Read more about his work at http://owlgoingback.com.
Tochi Onyebuchi holds a B.A. from Yale, an MFA in Screenwriting from Tisch, a Masters degree in Global Economic Law from L’institut d’études politiques, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s and Ideomancer, among other places. Tochi resides in Connecticut, where he works in the tech industry and is currently writing the sequel to Beasts Made of Night.
In Book One of the Beasts Made of Night series, seventeen-year-old Taj sets off on an epic journey. In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts—lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family. When Taj is called to eat a sin of a member of the royal family, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves—and his own life.
Debut author Tochi Onyebuchi delivers an unforgettable series opener that powerfully explores the true meaning of justice and guilt. Packed with dark magic and thrilling action, Beasts Made of Night is a gritty Nigerian-influenced fantasy perfect for fans of Paolo Bacigalupi and Nnedi Okorafor.
FaceBook: [https://www.facebook.com/tochionyebuchifanpage/]
Lauren Salerno recommends
Alison Littlewood was raised in Penistone, South Yorkshire, and attended the University of Northumbria at Newcastle (now Northumbria University). Originally, she planned to study graphic design, but “missed the words too much” and switched to a joint English and History degree. She followed a career in marketing before developing her love of writing fiction.
Her latest novel is The Crow Garden, a tale of obsession set amidst Victorian asylums and séance rooms. It follows The Hidden People, a Victorian tale about the murder of a young girl suspected of being a fairy changeling. Alison’s other novels include A Cold Silence, Path of Needles, The Unquiet House, and Zombie Apocalypse! Acapulcalypse Now. Her first book, A Cold Season, was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club and described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.”
Alison’s short stories have been picked for Best British Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime. They have been gathered together in her collections Quieter Paths and in Five Feathered Tales, a collaboration with award-winning illustrator Daniele Serra. She won the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction.
Alison lives with her partner Fergus in deepest Yorkshire, England, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls. She loves exploring the hills and dales with her two hugely enthusiastic Dalmatians and has a penchant for books on folklore and weird history, Earl Grey tea, and semicolons.
She is on Twitter as @Ali__L, or find her on Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/alison.littlewood.3?ref=tn_tnmn].
Recommending: The Crow Garden. “There’s an amazing sense of place and time in this novel, as Littlewood perfectly captures the literary style, attitudes, and class consciousness of Victorian England.” — Publishers Weekly
Susan Hill meets Alfred Hitchcock in Alison Littlewood‘s latest chiller. Haunted by his father’s suicide, Nathaniel Kerner walks away from the highly prestigious life of a consultant to become a mad-doctor. He takes a position at Crakethorne Asylum, but the proprietor is more interested in phrenology and his growing collection of skulls than the patients’ minds. Kerner’s only interesting case is Mrs. Victoria Harleston. Her husband accuses her of hysteria and delusions, but she accuses him of hiding secrets far more terrible. Kerner is increasingly obsessed with Victoria, but when he has her mesmerised, there are unexpected results: she starts hearing voices, the way she used to. Her grandmother always claimed they came from beyond the grave, but it also unleashes her own powers of mesmerism … and a desperate need to escape. Increasingly besotted, Kerner finds himself caught up in a world of séances and stage mesmerism in his bid to save Victoria. But constantly hanging over him is this warning: that doctors are apt to catch the diseases with which they are surrounded—whether of the body or the mind.
Linda Addison recommends
Amber Fallon lives in a small town outside Boston, Massachusetts that she shares with her husband and their two dogs. A techie by day and a horror writer by night, Amber has also spent time as a bank manager, motivational speaker, produce wrangler, and apprentice butcher. Her obsessions with sushi, glittery nail polish, and sharp objects have made her a recognized figure around the community.
Amber’s publications include The Terminal, The Warblers, TV Dinners from Hell, Daughters of Inanna, Sharkasaurus, So Long and Thanks for All the Brains, Daily Frights 2012, Women of the Living Dead, Zombie Tales, Here Be Clowns, Horror on the Installment Plan, Zombies For a Cure, Quick Bites of Flesh, Daily Frights 2013, Mirror, Mirror, Operation Ice Bat, Painted Mayhem, and Return to Deathlehem.
About The Warblers: After the sun would go down, I’d hear them out there, back by the shed, shrieking their twisted warbling cries out there in the night, followed by squeals of whatever prey they’d managed to hunt down.
When his rural farm becomes overrun with terrifying beasts called Warblers capable of eating livestock, dogs, and even people, 14-year-old Dell McDale sees his life torn asunder. He watches through the eyes of a boy on the verge of becoming a man as his father is forced to go to awful lengths to rid the family home of the infestation, culminating in a confrontation between Dell and a local bully-turned-soldier on a night that will change everyone involved, forever.
The Warblers is a mysterious tale of a young man learning what fear can do to people and what happens, when in order to fight monsters, one must side with another monster.
For more information, please tweet her @Z0mbiegrl or visit her blog at http://www.amberfallon.net and listen to her podcast, It Cooks!, on The Project Entertainment Network!
