Hotel Impala
Fiction
ISBN #978-1-940189-35-2
Leah Killian has long since given up on silencing the noises that reverberate through her mind. Her one comfort comes with knowing she will never be alone in her madness: her twelve-year-old daughter Grace has promised she will never leave her, even as she travels one precarious road after another in search of anything that will lessen her pain.
For Grace, there was once life on a quiet suburban street, where she and her sister Zoey dutifully repeated the family mantra: Our Mom is fine. It’s just that she sometimes lives inside her head. But as Leah becomes increasingly untethered from reality, chasing one grand scheme after another and searching for the magical whooping crane she believes will cure her, Grace finds herself in the worst place yet: Motel Mount Pleasant, with its drugs, hookers, and a pimp plying her little sister with chocolate.
It is here that Grace must finally surrender the hope and denial that have sustained her and make a choice: keep her promise to her mother or keep herself and her sister safe.
Buy a copy in paperback HERE
Also available in Kindle format
It’s Not Like I Knew Her
Winner of the Foreword Review Bronze Medal for LGBTQ Fiction
ISBN #978-1-940189-12-3
Jodie Taylor’s childhood is filled with loss, abuse, chronic
disappointment, and an instinctive awareness that her desire for women will forever make her an outcast. At 18, she flees her home town in rural north Florida and arrives in racially charged Selma, Alabama in 1956 as a penniless fugitive. She finds work in a café that is frequented by racist nightriders and, with an eye on the door, she hunkers down behind a
wall of lies and half-truths. Her self-imposed silence with the family she left behind is broken when a crisis sets Jodie on a backward journey. As she struggles to reconcile her past with the
present, she begins the inward journey she must take to truly find her
home.
Buy a copy in paperback HERE
Also available in Kindle Format
Dream Chaser
Fiction
ISBN #978-1-940189-02-4
Deep in the Apalachicola National Forest, in the cold drizzle of a North Florida winter, Jesse McKnight struggles to recapture a wild mustang mare that shouldn’t be there – wouldn’t be there except for his inept attempt to win his daughter’s heart.
Jesse, absorbed for years by his own broken dreams, has unexpectedly become a single parent to his three children, a role he believes is trusted only to mothers. His sixteen-year-old son, Cole, blames him for his mother’s unlikely decision to leave him and his sisters in their father’s care. His four-year-old daughter, Sky, won’t speak in his presence. Only eleven-year-old Katie, a tough realist with a soft spot for broken things, has always tried to believe in him. The mustang is intended as a birthday surprise for Katie, but the abused and terrified animal breaks free of a hastily constructed B the day she is delivered. Jesse swears to Katie that, with the help of his profane, bootlegging, paraplegic best friend, he will find and return the mare. As their journey unfolds, recapturing the mustang becomes Jesse’s path to redemption, even as he becomes the mare’s only hope for survival.
Buy a copy in paperback or Kindle HERE
What Readers Say About Pat’s work
“Fine, damn fine. And at times simply stunning !”
– Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina
Pat Spears is a rare writer. She peers into the
heart of darkness and finds, of all things,
redemption.
– Connie May Fowler, author of How Clarissa
Burden Learned to Fly and Before Women had Wings
Hotel Impala (Twisted Road Publications 2024) by Pat Spears is a singularly powerful, heart-stopping novel of resiliency and survival—and love. Part coming-of-age and part modern family saga, Hotel Impala tells a poignant, intense story written with the realism of a memoir, though it is fictional. All in all, this is a stellar book, wonderfully crafted with a story that needs to be told.
Claire Matturro for Well Read Magazine
It’s Not Like I Knew Her
Jodie Taylor is growing up queer, poor and white in the rural south in the 1960’s. She is also the headstrong and compelling protagonist in Pat Spear’s wonderful novel It’s Not Like I Knew Her. Spears doesn’t shy away from the realities of race, sexuality and class bigotry. But this gritty, complex, character- driven story is Jodi’s. Rarely have I been so taken by a personality in a novel as I have been by the stubborn, broken generous Jodie Taylor.
Sally Bellerose
for Lambda Literary Review
Dream Chaser is like the best country music song transformed into a lyrical, rhythmic story that’s as real and bittersweet as the last watermelon of summer.
Dream Chaser offers up a slice of Florida life we don’t often see in literature – tough people trying to do the right thing without the benefit of suburban comforts. In writing Dream Chaser, Spears has made it a world worth exploring.
Tricia Booker
Hotel Impala, Pat Spears’ third novel, is an extraordinary tour de force of storytelling.
An engrossing page-turner filled with superb and often stunning prose, Hotel Impala is a literary work of art that will lift your soul as it breaks your heart. Like the magical whooping crane that Leah searches for, it is a rare bird indeed.
Renee Anduze
It’s Not Like I Knew Her
Meet Jodie Taylor
“Jodie (Taylor) is a complex character. Her stubbornness and her generosity to others seem to be at odds with each other, but they are simply different aspect of her personality.
Spears has the wonderful ability to describe people, place and events so well that we feel we know them. . . . I urge everyone to meet Jodie. I am sure that you will grow to love her as I have.
Amos Lassen
Dream Chaser
Spears has a remarkable gift of taking the kind of rundown man we’d shake our heads over (thinking: what a loser, no wonder his life is a mess) and painting his humanity with such tenderness we want to rush up to the next down-on-his-luck stranger we see and offer a hug and assistance.
If you can read this novel without loving Jesse McKnight, you’ve forgotten what it is like to act like a silly fool to coax a smile from your baby, or to chase after dreams of a better life for your children.
Donna Meredith for Southern Literary Review