Coming June 8, 2026

I wrote Send the Fire over the course of many years, mostly at a kitchen table, mostly in the early morning hours when the house was quiet and the past was loud. I am writing now to tell you a little about why.

This is the third book in a trilogy. Dear Joseph asked the first question: what does it cost a boy to grow up in a house where tenderness is read as weakness, and weakness as sin? Bless Their Hearts widened the lens to the people around him — the women who carried the same wound, the men who passed it down, the kind hands and cruel ones, sometimes belonging to the same person. Send the Fire picks up the night Joseph drives away. Alone. Headlights through Alabama fog. A bag in the backseat. A sketchbook. Eighteen years of held breath behind him, and ahead of him, a small Pentecostal Bible college in the hills of East Tennessee that has promised, in its way, to save him.

The book is about what happens next.

I want to say something here about what this book is and what it isn't, because I think readers deserve that.

Send the Fire is creative fiction. The characters are based on real people, and the college is based on a real college. The world is real. The chapel pews are real. The covenant is real. The closet is real, and so is the door, and so is the hymn hummed on the other side of it. I lived inside a version of this world, and so did some of you, and we know each other the way two people who have crawled out of the same well sometimes know each other without ever having met. If that is you, I hope the book finds you gently. If that is not you, I hope it lets you stand for a few hours inside a life you did not have to live, and feel some of what was at stake, and leave a little changed.

A note on the fire.

In the world of the book, send the fire is what the revivalists prayed for at the altar — the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of conviction, the fire that was supposed to burn the wrongness out of you. It was a beautiful, terrifying phrase. I heard it shouted in tents and churches for the first eighteen years of my life. I believed in it. I was afraid of it. I wanted it to come for me, and I was terrified of what it would do when it did.

What I learned — and what Joseph learns — is that the fire those preachers prayed for was not the fire that would save him. The fire that saved him was the one that was already inside him. The one in the sketchbook. The one in the way he loved his friends. The one his grandmother had tried to tell him about, in her small kitchen, with a bird in her hands, the one she did not get to finish naming before they took him away from her.

You were never broken. You were just trapped in a house that called brokenness holiness. If this book does anything at all, I hope it helps say that.

A few practical notes.

This book is best read in the order of the trilogy — Dear Joseph, then Bless Their Hearts, then Send the Fire — but it can be read on its own. The story stands. Readers new to Joseph will not be lost.

A word on content. Send the Fire contains depictions of religious trauma, family rejection, conversion-culture rhetoric, and the long shadow of growing up closeted in a fundamentalist home. There is some violence and a great deal of grief. There is no explicit content. There is, I hope, more tenderness than pain — but the pain is here, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

I am asked sometimes whether writing the trilogy was difficult. The honest answer is that writing it was not the hard part. The hard part was the eighteen years before. The writing was the breath after.

The sketches at the end of the book are something I have wanted to include since the beginning. In Dear Joseph, Joseph hides a sketchbook beneath the winter sweaters in the bottom drawer. I always knew what was in it. I wanted you to see, finally, what he saw — the faces he held, the rooms he passed through, the small holy things he did not have language for. The drawings are an offering. They are also an answer to the question the trilogy has been asking, in its quiet way, all along.

If you have read this far, thank you. Thank you for spending your time with this story. Thank you for spending it with Joseph, and with Andy, and with the people who, at a kitchen table I will never sit at again, made room for a boy who did not yet know he was allowed to take up space.

If the book reaches you, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads. For independent authors writing in the literary corners of the world, reviews are how the next reader finds us. They matter more than you know.

Write to me, if you'd like. I read every letter.

With gratitude,

Alexander Thompson
Dallas, Texas
2026