Spencer K.M. Brown

Award-winning Author of Hold Fast and Move Over Mountain

SLOW FIRE

Stories by

Spencer K.M. Brown

On Sale, Summer 2026 from Loblolly Press

From award-winning author Spencer K.M. Brown, SLOW FIRE is a collection of Southern stories about people living at the edge of belief—religious, familial, and personal—where grace is rare, suffering is ordinary, and endurance becomes a quiet form of love.

Set among frozen hollers, decaying motels, burning fields, and small towns hungry for spectacle, these stories follow mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, preachers and murderers, and outcasts and wanderers confronting loss, disability, violence, and moral uncertainty. A woman watches her past collapse beneath the blade of a bulldozer. A self-anointed preacher nails himself to a cross, convinced the end has arrived, only to discover that the world, indifferent and unrepentant, continues without him.

Fire and snow recur as elemental forces throughout the collection, promising cleansing, preservation, or erasure. Animals move through the margins as witnesses. Children observe with unsettling clarity. Families and communities strain under inherited pressure, while would-be heroes falter. What endures are small acts of care, practiced without audience or reward.

Written in a clean and lyrical voice, SLOW FIRE examines faith without romance, suffering without self-pity, and love as something practiced daily rather than proclaimed. Redemption here is not spectacle. It arrives through survival, attention, and the stubborn refusal to abandon grace—or one another.

Praise for Slow Fire:

“Edith Wharton spoke of ‘the hard considerations of the poor,’ and her quote is apt for this exceptional book of stories. In a world filled with bad circumstances and bad choices, Brown’s people exhibit a fierce integrity as they seek to endure, if not transcend, their plights. Striking language, wisdom, and a profound empathy make Slow Fire one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long while.” — Ron Rash, NY-Times Best-Selling Author of The Caretaker

Recommendations for a Departing Soul - Regal House, 2027

I’m pleased to announce my new Southern Gothic novel, Recommendations for a Departing Soul will be published by Regal House Publishing in the Fall of 2027!

Publisher’s Marketplace, 11/25/25: Author of Hold Fast and Move Over Mountain Spencer K.M. Brown's RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A DEPARTING SOUL, a Southern Gothic novel pitched as Wise Blood meets As I Lay Dying and Gilead, which follows two brothers and their violent, estranged uncle across a near-apocalyptic North Carolina to bury their mother as supernatural visions and buried sins press them toward redemption, to Jaynie Royal at Regal House, for publication in fall 2027 (world).

Bio

Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one chapbook of poetry, Cicada Rex. His debut collection of stories Slow Fire is forthcoming from Loblolly Press, Fall 2026.