Alex Grass on Infernal Tramps, Body Horror & Weird Terror

Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror is out today, and Alex Grass sat down with us for a horror author interview that went everywhere we hoped it would. He traces his horror education back to a father who took him to see Terminator 2 when he was six, and a mother who kept buying him pulp paperbacks based on how cool the covers looked (she had no idea what was inside). The Fly is the one that did the real damage. The body horror hooked him, but it was the descent into the beast that stuck.   INFERNAL TRAMPS: WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS - Seventeen stories, flash fiction up to novelettes, and they do not connect. Start in the middle, at the end, wherever. - His standing pitch: if you want the experience of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker smoking bath salts together and then writing short stories, he has that for you.   WHERE TO START READING - “A Woman of Distinction” for short, punchy and kind of funny. Dark, but one of the less weird ones. - “A New World Basement” if you want to start dark. - “The EP™ Implant” if you want to start weird. This is his pick for the weird entry point.   HOW ALEX GRASS GOT INTO HORROR - A father who took him to Terminator 2 at six, and a mother who bought him pulp paperbacks because the covers looked cool (she had no idea what was inside). - The Fly is his childhood trauma pick. Body horror hooked him, but the descent into the beast is what stuck.   THE GROTESQUE AND THE LINE OF WEIRD - Horror done right holds a wistful beauty and a brutality at once. Alex points at real life: dying is not pretty, and you remember the good times anyway. - The inversion is aspiring toward beauty and creating the grotesque instead. He calls it the silicone industrial complex. Arthur clocks it: sounds like he has seen The Substance. He has. He loves it. - Defining weird takes a rollerblader in lingerie and a man walking an ocelot through Bushwick. The line is where benign deviancy starts causing somebody pain. The Elvis version is even better.   PROCESS, OR THE LACK OF ONE - He planned two of the novels. Short stories have too much flex in the joints; his outline would read “one, eggs. Two, eggs with spider legs.” - It is not that the settings are mundane; it is that terrible things wait inside mundanity, and power gets wielded dumbly and cruelly inside bureaucracies. - The notebook he carried while drinking produced “what if cheese pocket” and “soda cans equals hypocrisy.” Usable ideas out of it: zero, not once. - The routine is 300 words, day off, 3,000 words, day off, reset. He is not trying to fix it.   HORROR BOOKS ALEX GRASS RECOMMENDS - Reggie Oliver, for M. R. James-style English academic occult stories. “The Mortlake Manuscript” runs a lineage from John Dee to Aleister Crowley. - Clive Barker’s Rawhead Rex, closer to what Alex writes. - Bentley Little, who made the bank, the store, and the town terrifying. People keep asking for a horror story about an HOA. He wrote it. It is appalling. - Attila Veres out of Hungary via Valancourt Books, hallucinatory stuff about a vineyard serving something that is not quite wine. - The Butcher of Nazareth by David Scott Hay, and not the anti-Christian book Alex expected.    Find Infernal Tramps on Amazon (search “Infernal Tramps by Alex Grass,” G-R-A-S-S, like the green grass) or at infernaltramps.com. Follow us & Subscribe:SpotifyApple PodcastTikTokInstagramThreadsGrave Tone Horror Podcast Website Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.