Brenna E. Lorenz is a geochemist, retired college professor, onomastics researcher, video game player, and writer of uncomfortable fiction.
She is also a grandmother with the sense of humor of a ten-year-old boy, which may explain a great deal.
Her fiction leans toward the odd, the scary, the humorous, and the nauseating. She is drawn to stories that do not behave, characters who do not clean themselves up for company, and worlds that look familiar until something in them starts to rot.
Brenna earned her Ph.D. from Memorial University of Newfoundland and taught at several academic institutions, including the University of Guam. Her life has taken her through unusual places, including Pensacola, Florida, and Erie, Pennsylvania, locations she credits as rich material for dystopian fiction.
As a child, she savored the work of Charles Beaumont, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Graves. That early love of strange storytelling helped shape the kind of fiction she writes now: sharp, peculiar, funny, uncomfortable, and hard to mistake for anyone else’s.
She now lives with her long-suffering husband and cat in a small town in northern Illinois.
For readers searching for a Best Weird Fiction Book with bite, or for Dark Humor Novels that push beyond safe jokes, Brenna’s fiction offers something sharper.
Brenna E. Lorenz writes speculative fiction with sharp teeth—stories that lean into the absurd, pull on the loose thread of “normal,” and keep pulling until something screams. The Corpse Problem is her darkly comic plunge into family rivalry, identity, and what happens when a bad decision collides with a worse coincidence.
You’ll probably love Brenna’s fiction if you like:
Wicked humor
Bold strange premises
Characters making bad decisions
Speculative worlds
Reach out to discuss unhinged plots, literary influences, or the merits of a good villain.