William Browning Spencer

William Browning Spencer (born 1946) is an award-winning American novelist and short story writer living in Austin, Texas. His science fiction and horror stories are often darkly and surreally humorous. His novel Resume With Monsters conflates soul-destroying H. P. Lovecraftian horrors with soul-destroying lousy jobs. His story "The Death of the Novel" was a 1995 Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Short Story.

In 2005, his short story "Pep Talk" was turned into a short film by writer Eric B. Anderson and director Scott Smith (Project Greenlight) and premiered at the Santa Fe Film Festival in December 2006.

Bibliography

Novels

• Spencer, William Browning (1990). Maybe I'll call Anna. Sag Harbor, New York: Permanent Press. 
• Resume With Monsters (1995, novel)
• Zod Wallop (1995, novel)
• Irrational Fears (1998, novel)

Short fiction

Collections

• The Return of Count Electric(1993, short story collection)
• The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006, short story collection)

List of short stories

• "Best Man" (1993)
• "A Child's Christmas in Florida" (1993)
• "Daughter Doom" (1993)
• "The Entomologists at Obala" (1993)
• "Graven Images" (1993)
• "Haunted by the Horror King" (1993)
• "Irrational Fears" (1993)
• "Looking Out for Eleanor" (1993)
• "Pep Talk" (1993)
• "The Return of Count Electric" (1993)
• "Snow" (1993)
• "The Wedding Photographer in Crisis" (1993)
• "The Ocean and All Its Devices" (1994)
• "The Death of the Novel" (1995), Bram Stoker Best Short Story Award 1996
• "Downloading Midnight" (1995)
• "The Oddskeeper's Daughter" (1995)
• "The Halfway House At the Heart of Darkness" (1998)
• "Stone and the Librarian" (2007)
• "The Tenth Muse" (2007)
• "Penguins of the Apocalypse" (2008)
• "The Essayist in the Wilderness" (2011)

Anthologies containing stories by William Browning Spencer

• Ghosttide (1993)
• Borderlands 4 (1994)
• Christmas Magic (1994)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction Eleventh Annual Collection (1994)
• Wheel of Fortune (1995)
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Eighth Annual Collection (1995)
• 100 Tiny Tales of Terror (1996)
• Year's Best SF (1996)
• Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H P Lovecraft in Popular Culture (1998)
• Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny (1998)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999)
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Twenty-First Annual Collection (2008)
• New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011)

Unpublished work

• Endless Laundry (unpublished)

External links

• Book group recount of an evening with William Browning Spencer
• Interview from 1999 at "Crescent Blues"
• Fantastic Fiction summary for William Browning Spencer
• Nova Express Interview
• Review of Irrational Fears
• Review of The Ocean and All Its Devices
• Another Review of The Ocean and All Its Devices
• Review of Resume with Monsters
• New York Times Review of Zod Wallop
• Review of Zod Wallop
• William Browning Spencer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database