This summer, things are going to get pretty weird. At least if Alex Grass has anything to do with it. His upcoming short story collection, Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror, is slated for release on July 15th.
“I’d like to think that if David Cronenberg and Clive Barker got together and smoked bath salts, they’d come up with something like Infernal Tramps.” The author says while crookedly smiling through press interviews inside his Brooklyn home.
“The thing of it is, I’m a pretty normal guy,” Alex says, while a freaky-looking feline wearing a gold chain stalks the author, like his familiar. The image evokes Salvador Dali and his pet ocelot. “Just because I used to work in a cemetery doesn’t mean I’m not normal. And there are plenty of people who steal motorcycles when they’re young. And there are lots of people who spend three months in rehab, too.”
To judge by its reception, Infernal Tramps is an experience that unsettles as much as titillates. “A quick shot of pure, unadulterated dread straight to the dome,” is how Blood for Beer Money author Emily Archuleta puts it.
She isn’t the only other writer to read Alex’s work. Patrick Barb, a Bram Stoker Award nominee, has an interesting take on the book: “The experience is akin to a late-night bus ride, where the only seat available is at the very back, next to a ranting, raving stranger.”
The stories have an undeniable flavour of phantasmagoric freakery. “Which is what I was going for,” Mr. Grass admits. Straight from the jump, the premises are insistently strange: a pest-control system that regenerates missing limbs, a woman driving through the wilderness with a pickup truck of mutant babies, a resurrected hellhound sending a whole city spiralling into violent insanity.
The writing is feverish. The characters, morally ambiguous. The imagery lush and apocalyptic all at once.
It’s hard to deny that the subtitle on the front of the book accurately represents what’s inside. These are, yes, definitely very Weird Tales of Terror. Weird enough, in fact, to prompt David Royce, book critic of the popular YouTube channel Horror Reads, to make this bold claim: “I highly doubt you’ll read a more bizarre collection of stories this year.”
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