The Seers’ Table June 2026

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”.

Geneve Flynn recommends:

Katya de Becerra  is the critically acclaimed author of horror-thrillers, including When Ghosts Call Us Home, What the Woods Keep, Oasis, and They Watch from Below. She has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist, and her novel When Ghosts Call Us Home won both the Aurealis and Shadows Award in 2023. Katya’s latest novel is Little Kin.

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Recommended Reading: Little Kin, Blackstone Publishing, releasing September 2026

Excerpt from Little Kin:

She never knew her birth parents, having been adopted as a baby by the Shanradoff-Krims of Ithaca, New York. They named her Cassini — Cass, for short — after the Cassini–Huygens missions, which gifted the world those shocking close-ups of Saturn before the orbiter gave in to cosmic strain and perished in the distant planet’s electrical storms one month short of turning twenty.

Unlike her ambitious namesake, Cass was mostly content within the confines of her own world, its boundaries demarcated by her lopsided Myrtle Ave studio apartment, her postdoc research nook at SUNY Albany, and the senior living facility at Shaker where her dad had been residing since his late-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Shaker was also where the ashes of Jacinta Krim kept their vigil on the windowsill, making Cass’s weekly pilgrimages all the more poignant. Cass missed her mom badly, having never fully recovered from the swift and ravenous illness that whisked her away just a few months before Cass walked her PhD graduation procession in a ridiculous floppy beret, a silky cape cascading down her shoulders, and her eyes burning with unshed tears.

Her life before adoption was such a vague idea, it carried almost no meaning — until a week earlier, when a call from an estate planning firm informed Cass that a late aunt she had no idea existed bequeathed to her a house located on a remote island called Rothagisht.

A bigger surprise came shortly after, when Cass found herself packing for the cold climate, booking a multi-stop budget fare to take her across the country, and then crossing the fog-shrouded Aranditeh Strait on a steam ferry bound for Rothagisht, a place known for its arctic demeanor and frozen exterior, as far from a tourist trap as a place could be.

Surrounded by crates of canned food, frozen meat, and fresh produce, Cass was the ferry’s only passenger. The boat’s captain, an older woman whose name slipped Cass’s mind the moment she’d boarded, remained elusive and left her skeleton crew — a stoic first mate called Dabora, and Umka, a standoffish cat — to keep Cass company on the journey.

Cass’s knowledge of Rothagisht was limited to what she could glean from her adoptive parents’ research conducted on the island long before she was born. Her late mother, a renowned linguist, earned her academic reputation by assembling the world’s first English-Farizh glossary. To this day, the Krim translation remained the only one in existence. No other scholar was allowed on the island in the decades following Jacinta’s visit and, therefore, no one could update her work, or verify it.

Mikhail Shandaroff, Cass’s father, an ethnomusicologist, left his own mark on the ultra-narrow field of Rothagisht research by studying the role of music in the island’s ways of preserving history and keeping tradition. He wrote about the sacred function certain tones and harmonies played on Rothagisht, and how the locals used those to ‘communicate’ with the inhospitable terrain they called home.

Cass never thought of Rothagisht as anything more than her parents’ long-ago research site. She was deeply curious, of course, fascinated by the stories of unfamiliar customs she heard throughout her childhood instead of fairy-tales — anecdotes which unfolded against the snow-hugged terrain and set to the mighty whispering of the Arctic Sea. She was so fascinated, in fact, that in the final year of her PhD, she looked into proposing Rothagisht as the primary research site for her postdoc. But that quest was over before it could truly begin. Strangers weren’t welcome on the island. A terse form response she received in the mail months after submitting her official request in writing to the island authorities was clear on that point and invited no follow-up questions.

But then, over a year later, in a twist Cass definitely didn’t see coming, her original birth certificate arrived in the mail. Provided by the law firm handling her inheritance, the certificate listed her birth parents as Paralah and Volak. No last name. Cass was registered as mainland-born, delivered in a small Alaskan hospital that no longer existed. Her birth parents, however, were recorded as Rothagisht residents.

According to the certificate, her given name was SyffBrigra.

Review for Little Kin:

“Full of rising tension and palpable dread, Little Kin grabs you by the hand and dares you to stare into the dark without flinching. Folk horror at its finest!” — Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Child

Follow Katya on Instagram, Facebook, X at: @KatyaDeBecerra

Website: https://katyadebecerra.com/

Author photo: Rachael Michelle

Nicole D. Sconiers recommends:

Javier Loustaunau is an author and game designer who was born in Mexico but now calls New England home. His work has been featured in the top-rated horror podcast The NoSleep Podcast. Professionally, Javier is a translator, business analyst, tutor and implementation consultant.

In his anthology, The Nope Game: And other short horror stories, he explores Mexican urban legends, generational trauma, anxiety, loneliness and bizarre encounters with the supernatural.

Javier believes writing Latinx characters is an act of subversion. In “I Migrated to Escape a Demon,” an industrial engineer flees Mexico for a mundane life in the United States after a hellish encounter on a dark road to Topolobampo. In “Addicted to Her Memories,” a wealthy gallery owner has a tryst with a troubled young woman addicted to drugs. When she dies and is cremated, he is euphoric to discover he can relive her memories by snorting her ashes. A sheltered college student turns the tables on a predatory stranger she meets in a bar in  “Harvest of the Wolf.” Javier’s stories focus less on the things that terrify us and more on confronting fear itself.

Recommended Reading: The Nope Game: And other short horror stories (2022)

Excerpt from The Nope Game: And other short horror stories:

We somehow flipped. It was so quick that it felt like an amusement park ride, as the whole room blurred and came back into focus. Now I was on top of him, and he was the one who looked like he was in pain. I dug my fingers into him, and the flesh just opened right up with no resistance. It really felt like a dream, not like I was strong but like he was made from something soft that I could just tear apart and shove into my mouth, like tearing into a cherry pie at a pie eating contest at the state fair.

The cloudiness in my head was gone and was replaced by a strong survival instinct. I was not going to be found with him. I would instead shower and put all my clothes in a trash bag and leave wearing nothing but his t-shirt which hung loose on me like a dress. I ran back to the dorm with thousands of thoughts running through my head, but also an eerie sense of satisfaction for having finally stood up for myself.

Holding the t-shirt in my hands it feels like I’m 18 all over again and full of those teenaged feelings. I was so upset that Kyle did not want to talk to me, like that was somehow the most dramatic thing that happened that night. When he eventually did sit down and talk to me, I told him that nothing happened that night, in part to reassure him and in part because I needed him as an alibi. He would tell me that he thought he was jealous of all the men around me but had realized he was just jealous of me.

It would take another few months for that to really sink in as he became more comfortable with who he was. It took a lot longer for me to get comfortable with who I am. The t-shirt with the wolf and blood and the hungry gaze…I guess we are most scared of the things we identify with.

Follow Javier on Facebook: facebook.com/jloustaunau.

Linda D. Addison recommends:

Paula Cappa is a multiple award-winning novelist and short story author of supernatural mysteries, Gothic thrillers, and dark fantasy. Her novel Draakensky, A Supernatural Tale of Magick and Romance (Crystal Lake Publishing) won the Gold Medal in Gothic at The BookFest Book Awards.

Other supernatural novels are The Dazzling Darkness, Night Sea Journey, and Greylock (Crispin Books), and the novelette Sky Wolf. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as The Lorelei Signal, Coffin Bell Literary Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sirens Call Ezine, ParABnormal Magazine, Dark Gothic Resurrected, and many others. She is a member of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic.

Recommended Reading: An excerpt from her latest novel, Wolf Magick, a cross-genre of Gothic horror, supernatural, and fantasy (magick) released June 2026 from Crystal Lake Publishing.

Excerpt from Chapter One: Shadow Wolves:

In his green barn house in Bedford, New York, surrounded by pine and hemlocks, Marc Sexton swore to cast off all shadows. Not just the shadows of day or night; Marc swore to cast off his lurking fear of shadow wolves.

Their spectral shapes hovered on the bedroom wall—which woke him at random, triggered by what, he could only guess. He renounced the blackened forms flaunting their brute ears that loomed so high their shadowy heads stretched onto the ceiling.

The voice of his father, Matthew Liam Sexton, surfaced—deep, smooth, captivating. Your wolf magick lives inside your soul, Marc. If you wish to perform your own wolf magick, my boy, you‘ll have to swear off all thoughts of the mere supernatural. Our wolf magick is far greater.

“I don’t wish it,” Marc had recalled answering Da, a quaver holding each word.

Even though it had been many years since that conversation when he was ten years old, the words still haunted Marc at age thirty-nine. The stinging disappointment on his father’s face at the rejection of wolf magick, the way he ran his fingers through his blond hair as if to deny the answer—and the pain saturating his blue eyes—never could Marc wipe that crushing moment from his memory.

The specters on the wall foretold the monstrous shadow wolves were stalking closer than ever before. Marc moved to the bedroom window: on the pond and surrounding woods, a calm moon rested over the twenty beauties in his ogham tree grove. Tree spirits soothed and shed goodness, his magickal beings of green kin—oak and ash, willow, pine, birch. Apple and hazel. Hawthorn and blackthorn. Rowan, alder, and holly, all waiting for his greeting every day. And his splendid owls, thirty-nine of them, visited the tree grove regularly in spectacular flocks.

Moonlight shimmered on the pond’s smooth surface. Were those loons flying over the water, red throats blazing? Five of them faithfully returned to his pond every April, but he had yet to see them, and it would be May 1st tomorrow. Beltaine, the Celtic magickal festival of fire.

At sunset on Beltaine, Marc would build a bonfire of rowan and oak in his stone fire pit by the pond to welcome summer. To celebrate sun and stars. To celebrate the woman he loved, Charlotte Knight, and give her a taste of the Celtic tradition. Champagne, roasted salmon, Green Man salad, and brown bread baked with the family’s world-famous Sexton Irish Whiskey.

He had commissioned Alice Eve, his floral maestro, to make a wildflower head-wreath for Charlotte to wear—kept cool in the fridge. The engagement ring, a generous emerald- cut sapphire, blue as the deep sky, was kept safe in his dresser drawer. Would she be dazzled by it? Fall into his arms? He could hardly wait to slip it on her finger.

Thundering broke his reverie. He recognized the drumbeats penetrating his head, enchantment suddenly upon him. Feeling feverish, body aching, limbs tightening and expanding, Marc fought it off. He willed the drumbeats away, dreading the summons.

Determined will is the beginning of all magickal operations. How often had he recalled Paracelsus’s quote at moments like this?

Falling into bed, fingers surrounding the silver wolf pendant at his neck, he drew up his highest will for protection. A clawing wind burst through the open windows. He rose to shut them as screech owls broke out their warnings. Blinded briefly by moonlight, he glanced to the far side of his property.

A pack of humped shadow wolves emerged, skulking between the trees. Sturdy, like bone and flesh, legs muscular as lions, they bore a swinging weight, stomping across the lawn. At least a dozen wolf eyes shone with vapory fire, fearless and unfettered, these snarling hunters, the Ripper pack of Black Wolf Realm.

His father had warned him: Beware of shadowing—words said on the day the man died.

The largest wolf came forward, black head flaring white triangles on both sides—the Ripper, the pack’s alpha male.

Marc’s body responded automatically with sharp energy accelerating down his spine. Drumming broke deeper into his forehead. The triple-spiral web spun light over him, urging his body into a power shift. He beat back the urge to surrender. He would not surrender to the summons.

Visit Cappa’s Reading Fiction Blog at https://paulacappa.wordpress.com./

Follow her at: https://linktr.ee/pcappa9