Fiction
ISBN #978-1-940189-35-2
392 Pages - $19.95
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
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.
Hotel Impala
About the Author
Pat Spears is the author of two novels and numerous short stories. Her second novel, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, won the bronze medal for Foreword Review’s Book of the Year in LGBTQ Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Sinister Wisdom, Appalachian Heritage, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, and Seven Hills Review, and anthologies titled Law and Disorder from Main Street Rag, Bridges and Borders from Jane’s Stories Press, Saints and Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2012, and Walking the Edge, a southern gothic anthology from Twisted Road Publications. She is a sixth generation Floridian and lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her partner, two dogs and one rabbit.