The Seers’ Table October 2024
Kate Maruyama, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community
Spooky season is here with a wonderful variety of flavors of horror! Dig into stirring poetry, creep through some short stories, sample some body horror of a debut novelist, and enter a slow burn of a thriller horror just as it gets hot.
Linda Addison recommends:
Corey Niles was born and raised in the Rust Belt. His debut novel, Blood & Dirt, was released in August 2022. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in over twenty publications, including Nightmare Magazine, Ghost Orchid Press, and Lycan Valley Press. He currently lives in North Carolina with his partner, Sean, and a small army of fur babies.
Niles’ first book of queer horror poetry, Death & Other Forms of Devotion, will be released from Alien Buddha Press on October 13. Content Warning: This book includes elements of and/or allusions to violence, murder, trauma, PTSD, abuse, SV, SA, drugs and alcohol, sex and nudity, cannibalism, and cults.
The poetry in his latest book is a kaleidoscope of the many paths to death, devotion, and the living nightmares surfacing on the way. I loved the terrible beauty/aching hope of the poems; the journey through loss and conversations delivered along the way.
Recommended Reading: Death & Other Forms of Devotion.
A poem from the collection:
stairway to hell
I required no railing or gentle hand to steady
my descent
every turn of that spiraling stairway
decorated with the husks of the hopeful
felt like a distant memory
even if Virgil had appeared a laurel wreath adorning his head
I would’ve turned him away
I had witnessed the devourment of Capocchio’s throat
a thousand times
and I welcomed those familiar circles right down to the folly of man
Follow Niles at: https://coreyniles.com/; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/corey.niles.9???; Twitter: @CoreyLNiles; Instagram: @coreylniles.
Geneve Flynn recommends:
Christ Nogle is the author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated and Bram Stoker Award®-winning first novel Beulah (from Cemetery Gates Media) and three short-fiction collections, the Stoker-nominated The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future; Promise: A Collection of Weird Science Fiction; and One Eye Opened in That Other Place (all from Flame Tree Press). Her work has also appeared in over fifty publications, including PseudoPod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Apex Magazine. She is co-editor with Willow Dawn Becker of the Stoker-nominated anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror (Weird Little Worlds) and co-editor with Ai Jiang of Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia (Shortwave Publishing). Follow her at https://christinogle.com and across social media @christinogle.
Recommended reading: The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future.
Excerpt: from “The Porches of Our Ears,” a short story from The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future:
The hospital room is dark and quiet apart from the whirr and pulse of machines. The television is muted, its soft cold light playing over the edges of Ross’s wife asleep in the chair.
Ross hears his own breathing, slow and deep. He passes from memory to memory in fluid free association.
He remembers visiting Grandma in a hospital room just like this one and in his parents’ blue ranch house with its strange arrangement of rooms. The memories are blurred and vignette-edged and have no sound.
The Epic of Gilgamesh comes to him, one of the stories Grandma made him read, or told him—he can’t say which. The powerful King Gilgamesh, one-third human and two-thirds god, running through the center of the Earth to find immortality. Ross smiles thinking of it, how Gilgamesh chased the Sun through a hole in the Earth and to the other side of the world!
And then Ross remembers the thing that sent Gilgamesh searching, the injustice he felt when he took in the death of his great friend Enkidu. He sat with the corpse and did not accept what had happened until a week had passed, when a maggot fell from its nose.
“That was no maggot,” Ross says out loud. He feels tears on his face.
His wife does not stir in her chair.
Review for The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future: “… truly weird fiction at its finest …” — Jo Kaplan, author of When the Night Bells Ring
Follow Christi Nogle at: https://linktr.ee/christinogle,
https://christinogle.substack.com/. https://www.instagram.com/christinogle/. https://twitter.com/ChristiNogle.
https://bsky.app/profile/christinogle.bsky.social.
Kate Maruyama Recommends:
M.M. Olivas is a Chicana-futurist, daydreamer, storyteller of things that come from the dark, as well as an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the 2023 Under the Volcano Writers Residency. Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, Apex, and Bourbon Penn. As a trans, first-generation Chicana, she explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, earning her MFA in Creative Writing at San Jose State University and collecting transforming robots. More information about Olivas and her fiction can be found at olivasthewriter.wtf.
Recommended reading: Sundown in Ojuela, out November from Lanternfish Press.
Excerpt: from Sundown in Ojuela:
THE NIGHT YOU KILL OLIVER, you sit crouched on the floor with your knees kissing your chest, your back against the door as sounds of struggle leak through: shoes yelping streaks against the floor (you’ll have to scrub them out later); the chair gasping with twists. Even if it isn’t really you doing the cutting, holding the dagger, you brought him here all the same. You can’t take it—the soft pounding that finds you no matter where you hide in Casa Coyotl; the rhythmic tune the night strums into your head—so you take Oliver’s keys and drive his Dodge out into desert until your town is nothing more than the lights of the ICE facility twinkling on the jagged horizon. To vastness and emptiness, where coyote howls stretch out the sky and your blood itches with the songs of long dead gods.”
You can learn more about M.M. Olivas at https://olivasthewriter.wtf/ or follow her on Instagram or Threads @m.olives.97.
and:
Lilliam Rivera is a MacDowell fellow, a screenwriter, and an award-winning author of nine works of fiction: a forthcoming horror book, four young-adult novels, three middle-grade books, and a graphic novel for DC Comics. Her books have been awarded a Pura Belpré Honor, been featured on NPR, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and multiple “best of” lists. Her novel Never Look Back is slated for an Amazon movie adaptation. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam has also written for the episodic podcast series “Love in Gravity,” which was recently nominated for a GLAAD.
Lilliam is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. She has also been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Speculative Literature Foundation. She received honorable mention in the 2018 James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award and in Bellevue Literary Review’s 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander.
Her short fiction and personal essays have appeared in various literary journals and publications including Tin House, Buzzfeed Books, and The Washington Post. She has been a featured speaker in numerous schools and book festivals throughout the United States and is on faculty at Hamline University and University of Nevada, Reno.
A Bronx, New York native, Lilliam currently lives in Los Angeles. Lilliam’s newest novel Tiny Threads was released September 24 of this year.
Recommended Reading: Tiny Threads (Penguin), September 24, 2024.
Excerpt:
At exactly two in the morning, a heavy rush of heat awakens her. When Samara opens her eyes, a weight presses down on her legs, pinning her body to the mattress. She’s unable to move. Not her fingers or her arms. Not her legs.
There’s the sound of a grunt, low, like a train rumbling across the city. The windows are shut and the sound is definitely coming from inside her apartment. She wants to run, to get away from whatever is making the noise. Samara tries to will her body to obey, but she can’t even wiggle her toes. She has no strength.
The stench from the slaughterhouse, a deathly mix of sulfur and vomit, causes her to gag. She breathes through her mouth in short bursts. There’s not enough oxygen.
Another grunt, this one closer to her bed.
You can learn more about Lilliam at lilliamrivera.com or follow her on IG or Twitter @lilliamr.
