The Seers’ Table May 2025
May Seers’ Table, Kate Maruyama, Diverse Works Inclusion Committee
Geneve Flynn recommends:
Pauline Yates is the creative force behind the multi-award-winning science fiction novel, Memories Don’t Lie, recognized in awards including the 2024 BookFest Awards winner in three categories (YA – Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action Adventure; Sci-fi – Genetic Engineering), 2024 American Legacy Book Awards – Finalist (Science Fiction); 2023 Indies Today Awards – Semi-Finalist, among others. She’s also the author of the short horror read, Dream Job, the sci-fi/horror novella, Shattered, and the horror short story collection, The Connections We Keep.
Her award-nominated short stories include “Blood Born”, Midnight Echo 18 (Aurealis Awards Best Horror Short Story – Finalist), “The Best Medicine”, Midnight Echo 16 (Australasian Shadows Awards Best Short Story – nominee), and “What It Means To Be With You” HWA Poetry Showcase X (Australasian Shadows Awards Best Poetry – Winner).
Her fiction and poetry appear in publications including Black Hare Press, Metaphorosis, Aurealis, PseudoPod, Twisted Wings Productions, IFWG Publishing International, plus others, and “The Best Medicine” was selected for translation and publication in the Mondi Incantati series published by Riflessi di Lunare (RiLL), Italy. She is the creator of Rumours Uncut, a digital interaction thriller produced for Story City, and she darkens the pages of many anthologies with her short fiction.
Her home is in a hinterland mountain range where she lives with her family and rescued pets. A magnet for the local wildlife, she loves the birds, the wallabies, and the bandicoots – not so much the snakes.
Recommended Reading: The Connections We Keep
Blurb: Step into a world where the ties that bind—love, family, and memory—twist into something far more chilling, and discover what really lurks in the shadows of human connection.
This collection of short stories explores the intricate and often chilling ties that bind people together, whether through blood, love, or the strange and supernatural.
Releases 30th April, 2025
Pre-orders available here: https://books2read.com/PYates-Connections
Excerpt from “Blood Born” in The Connections We Keep:
Thieve from me or shirk the bill,
Bear a lifetime urge to kill.
If you try to end the curse,
Two plus you will grace the hearse.
The curse torments my mind as I grab my car keys and push through the festering atmosphere in our house. Audrey sits on the couch, knees drawn, her white-knuckled fingers clutching her swollen belly. Empty potato chip packets litter the coffee table. She says that it’s all she can stomach if she doesn’t want to dry-heave over the toilet bowl. How she finds the strength to grow a baby when she barely eats, I don’t know. But grow it does, as though desperate to escape before it becomes her next victim. After catching her in the kitchen adding drain cleaner to my coffee like a woman possessed, I share the same fear. I’m only alive because she needs me, for her and our baby. But the constant worry that in a moment of madness she’ll forget I agreed to help her bear the curse is like walking on razor blades hoping not to get cut.
The offending book lies on the couch at her feet. I’ve asked her multiple times to put it out of sight, but she reads the curse on the inside cover over and over, trying to find a loophole. There isn’t one, as we’ve discovered. She succumbed to the curse four months ago, the moment she walked out of the store without paying for the book. She claimed it was an oversight because of “pregnancy brain” and immediately tried to return it. Instead, she came home with the book in her bag and a blood-splattered dress. The dead store clerk with the pen shoved through his eye made news headlines for a week.
Raging pregnancy hormones and memory lapses I could accept, but murder because of a penned curse? I refused to believe an author’s scribbles turned my gentle wife into a cunning killer. That changed when I found her standing over the bludgeoned gardener who she’d hired to mow the lawn.
Social media:
Find her on socials @midnightmuser1 or visit her website https://paulineyates.com/
Author photo credit: Pauline Yates
Kate Maruyama recommends :
Justin C. Key studied Biology at Stanford University. He’s been writing ever since. He is the author of is the author of The World Wasn’t Ready for You: Stories
In The World Wasn’t Ready for You, Key expands and subverts the horror genre to expertly explore issues of race, class, prejudice, love, exclusion, loneliness, and what it means to be a person in the world, while revealing the horrifying nature inherent in all of us. In the opening story, “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins,” a sci-fi love story turned nightmare, a husband uses new technology to download the consciousness of his recently deceased Black wife into the body of a white woman. In “Spider King,” an inmate agrees to participate in an experimental medical study offered to Black prisoners in exchange for early release, only to find his body reacting with disturbing symptoms. And in the title story, a father tries to protect his son, teaching him how to navigate a prejudiced world that does not understand him and sees him as a threat.
Justin lives in Los Angeles with his wonderful wife, two sons, and daughter. Even as a full-time Psychiatrist, he finds ample time to write. Just don’t ask him how he does it; he wouldn’t be able to tell you.
His short stories have appeared in the Stoker Award winning Out There and Screaming, Many Worlds: The Simulacra, The Swords in the Shadows, The Bridge to Elsewhere,The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, and KYSO Flash, as well as in the revolutionary children’s iPad application, FarFaria. He held a writing advice blog for several years at Scribophile.com and worked as a professional health blogger and content editor at WellnessFX while applying to medical school. Justin’s medical training richly informs his writing, and the power of story and narrative allows him to connect with patients on a deeper level.
Recommended Reading: from “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins” from The World Wasn’t Ready for You: Stories.
A White woman stood in the dining room. I had spent the morning agonizing over this first moment, formulating the perfect greeting and gestures and phrases. Now my dead wife was here, and I stood clutching my head, my mouth leaking water. What’s more, I was unprepared to hide the shock. With her loose0hanging curles, defined neck, and coy smile, she looked like a distant relative of the wild haired prisoner from the body-donor pictures. She looked nothing like the wife I knew. The One with tight black coils, full lips, and deep mahogany skinthe same shade as mine.
Except for the eyes.
She spread her arms. “I’m White, Darius. Only in America.” The voice was wrong; Theresa’s had been lower. “Ian’llhave a field day with this.”
“Life lasts a lifetime, our love lasts forever.” The phrase I rehearsed had sounded a lot better that morning in front of the mirror.
She laughed. My skin went down a size. This wasn’t going well. I turned to busy my hands with another glass of water.
You can find Justin at: JustinCKey.com, or follow him on Instagram and Threads @justinckey
Nicole D. Sconiers recommends:
Tade Thompson’s most recent books are Far from the Light of Heaven (2021) and Jackdaw (2022). He is the author of The Wormwood Trilogy and Rosewater, which won a Nommo Award and an Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the author of the Molly Southbourne books (Shirley Jackson Award finalist, winner of the Nommo Award) and Making Wolf (winner of the Golden Tentacle Award).
Born in London to Yoruba parents, Tade is a medical doctor who lives and works on the south coast of England where he battles an addiction to books.
In Gnaw, Harry and Tara Newton have just bought the decaying Irongrove Lodge, a fixer-upper that Harry believes is an ideal place to raise their children, Cory and Adrienne. The couple wrestles with trust issues, stemming from Harry’s wrongful incarceration for sexual assault. Their relationship woes are exacerbated by sinister goings-on at their new house.
Tara fears her family is being targeted by the former inhabitants of Irongrove Lodge, which was once a foster home for girls. Her young son writes bizarre messages, her daughter speaks an unnatural language and ghostly footsteps echo through the house. Gnaw is an intriguing take on the classic ghost story, a chilling exploration of the spiritual hunger of girls denied love and security.
Recommended reading: Gnaw (Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd.)
Excerpt from Gnaw:
“Why are they hungry?” asks Cory. “There’s food in the house.”
Why do they not eat, thinks Adrienne, then she shouts, “Gini la mu umm?”
Adrienne stares at one who has brown hair and sores on one half of her face. Her eyes are big and black and seem to grow larger. Adrienne is standing outside the house, but she is also swallowed up by the pupils.
Then she sees.
They are afraid, cold, hungry. They shiver in the dark, for the room has no lamp or heating, and the window is boarded up. None of the girls has the strength to prise the wood free. They have tried.
Sometimes they latch onto the frame and stare out of the cracks to see people walking by. When they see a handsome man they take turns, and they carry him into their fragmentary dreams. There are four cracks, and they stand on tiptoes on the skirting, and on each other’s shoulders to see. One of them waves, even though they know they are not seen.
They lick the floor and the walls. This is not easy as the room is full of their shed hairs, the floor looking like the balding pate of a giant. Madame Welther feeds them once a day. She opens the door and in her right hand is a bowl of porridge. She knows they are faint with hunger, but she waits, allows the smell of the food to reach their nostrils and the warmth of it to reach their skin. Then she swings back and pours it all over the floor. Sometimes she will just splash it on the walls. The girls will then rush forward and scoop what they can into their cupped hands. Over time the wall and the floor has become sweet with residue, and they lap at it even when it isn’t feeding time. They gnaw at the bed legs where there may have been some spatter. They chew off the wallpaper in no time, and the floor is shiny with their cleansing tongues.
