William Browning Spencer is an American novelist known for blending dark humor, surrealism, and myth with contemporary settings. His work often explores the collision between ordinary life and the uncanny, where systems, institutions, and routines quietly give way to something stranger.

He is best known for his novel, Résumé with Monsters, which has achieved cult status for its sharp satire of office culture and its inventive use of supernatural elements. The novel established Spencer’s reputation for combining absurdity and menace in ways that feel both imaginative and unsettlingly familiar.

Spencer’s fiction style has been described as darkly comic, philosophically inclined, and quietly subversive. When Elizabeth Hand reviewed Spencer’s novel, Irrational Fears, for The Washington Post Book World she began: “This book is so funny that when visitors to this reviewer’s house saw it and opened it at random, they began to laugh out loud. Maybe not a promising beginning for a Twelve Step program, but a very good one for a a novel.”

William Browning Spencer continues to write novels that examine what happens when the structures people rely on reveal unexpected cracks.