Alex Grass joined us the same week his short story collection Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror hit shelves, and the conversation went exactly where you would hope a conversation with a weird horror author goes. Rehab. Ocelots.
Fluorescent lighting as a sign of the coming heat death of the universe. Somewhere in there, a genuinely useful answer about what separates weird from gross. We recorded this one right before diving headfirst into our Fantasia Festival coverage, and honestly, it was the perfect warm-up.
Seven Years, One Watershed Moment
Alex has been writing for about seven years, and he traces it back to a specific turn in his life. He went to rehab, and when he came out, he found himself unable to finish law school, which is what he had been doing at the time. So he started reading and writing horror instead. There was something in the genre, he told us, that helped express
The yearning part of a human being that can’t be expressed through words.
That thread runs straight through his work, but it does not run evenly. The novels and the short stories come from two different versions of the same guy. As he put it, the longer work is “someone who’s still really working his shit out.” The short stories in Infernal Tramps are another thing entirely. That is a writer who has, in his words, “come to terms with his level of derangement” and decided that:
It’s a fine thing to make a go of spooking the hell out of people and freaking them out and maybe even grossing them out a little bit.
We appreciate that kind of honesty. Most authors might give you a mission statement. Alex gave us a diagnosis.
The Fly, the Dad, and a Mom With Bad Luck at Bookstores
His gateway into horror came through both parents, in completely different ways.
His father, whom Alex describes with real affection as a reprobate and a bit of a delinquent, took him to movies that a six-year-old should not be watching. Terminator 2 at six years old.
That pretty much informed my stance on AI ever since.
There was also an attempt to get him into an NC-17 screening, which failed, mostly because he was not even tall enough for the roller coaster.
His mother did the damage by accident. She loved that he read, so she bought him books. The problem is she picked them by cover appeal, and if you know anything about how pulp publishers dressed their books, you know the outside was scintillating, and the inside was horrifying.
She once bought him a book about the Holocaust with no idea what it was. She got him the leather-bound Sandman, which he read before he was ten, weird death and sexuality included.
He was also a latchkey kid, catching whatever spooky movie HBO ran on a Saturday night, back when you watched what was on and talked about it at school the next day because everyone had seen the same thing. Alex was careful to say he is not a golden ageist about it. It was just a different experience.
The movie that got him, though, is Cronenberg’s The Fly. Body horror, yes, but he keeps coming back to the transformation, the descent, and the irony of science (the thing meant to move a man toward enlightenment) turning him into a beast. He also admits a soft spot for what he calls the tragic mutant, from the Hunchback of Notre Dame to the deformed guy in 300 who cannot lift his shield.
Probably I see a little of myself in those guys.
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Beauty, Gristle, and the Inversion of the Grotesque
Meaghan pushed on the gap between Alex’s prose (elegant, careful, almost lovely) and his content (absolutely not lovely), and brought up Guillermo del Toro as the obvious touchstone for that split. Alex agreed that horror done right holds both at once: wistful beauty on one side, brutality and all the gristle of violence and disease on the other.
Then he made it personal, and this is the part that stuck with us. He talked about standing next to people you love while they die, which he has done more than once. Dying is not pretty. It is not. But you do not remember the bad times while that terrible physiological process is happening. You remember the good ones.
He flipped the idea, too. Sometimes the thing our culture calls beautiful is the actually repugnant one. He pointed at plastic surgery and what he called the silicone industrial complex, the business of convincing women that aging makes them less human. “That’s sick.” Instead of finding the beauty in the grotesque, it manufactures the grotesque out of aspiring toward beauty. Arthur clocked the vibe immediately: “It sounds like you’ve watched The Substance.” He has. He loves it.
For the record, Alex declines labels, including feminist, but he grew up around strong women. His mother was a prosecutor, her sister was a city judge, and his father’s mother did not suffer fools. His favorite illustration: a woman greeted her warmly at a restaurant in Harrisburg, and the woman was not three feet away when his grandmother said, “I have no idea who that is.“
What Weird Actually Means (The Ocelot Test)
Meaghan asked the question the subtitle demands: what does weird mean to you, and where is the line between weird and gross for the sake of gross?
Alex defines weird as the way you learn a word you do not know, through context clues. His examples are real people he has seen. A man rollerblading in women’s lingerie on the Upper East Side.
Another walking something that was almost an ocelot through Bushwick in a sheer robe. That is kooky. That is “a wonderful whack job.” The line gets crossed when benign deviancy transgresses into causing someone else pain. Swap the robe for nudity and the ocelot for a tiger, and you have violent insanity.
He has a cleaner version, too. A guy with a collection of Elvis Hummels and Elvis bottle caps is your uncle. A man who dresses like Elvis every day alone in his house is something else.
One, you would probably invite to the barbecue. The other, you would not.
Meaghan summed it up perfectly: it’s the difference between smiling in a confused way as you walk by and crossing the street.
Cheese Pocket, and Other Notes From a Drunk Notebook
Arthur asked about the process, since Alex’s stories tend to start somewhere mundane before twisting. Alex resisted the idea that there is intent behind it. One story starts with a guy trying to keep pests out of his garden. One starts with a humdrum alcoholic living outdoors. One starts with a carton of eggs.
His actual answer is better than any craft explanation:
It’s not necessarily that they’re mundane settings, but it’s that terrible things wait inside of mundanity. Power is wielded dumbly as it is wielded cruelly.
Bureaucracies. Overzealous ideologies. The stuff that turns otherwise decent people into slave masters. He has watched it happen around his neurodivergent son, with teachers who could not regulate themselves around a kid who does not speak.
He does not outline the short stories, and his reasoning made us laugh out loud. If he planned one, it would look like this:
One, eggs. Two, eggs with spider legs. Three, ominous note from dairy farmer. And it’s just like, at that point, I might as well just write the story already.
The writing schedule is just as unbothered. Three hundred words, a day off, three thousand, a thousand, reset. He is not trying to fix it. He put his effort into the monumental change of not drinking and cutting out the pathologies inherited down his family line, and he is not spreading that bandwidth thin for an extra three hundred words. Hard to argue.
Where to Start with Infernal Tramps
Ask Alex for recommendations, and you get a flood. Reggie Oliver, whose story The Mortlake Manuscript traces an occult manuscript from John Dee to Aleister Crowley through the secret history of the Wandering Jew.
Bentley Little, who takes the mundane and makes it terrifying, and who already wrote the HOA horror novel people keep asking for. Attila Veres, the Hungarian writer at Valancourt Books, whose hallucinatory vineyard story serves something that is not quite wine. David Scott Hay’s The Butcher of Nazareth, which Alex expected to be anti-Christian, but found was not.
His read on the moment: there are no gatekeepers anymore, which means the barbarians have to regulate themselves. Yes, there is unreadable dross. There is also brilliant stuff on r/NoSleep and the Backrooms, which his oldest daughter showed him. An endless windowless office.
I would prefer roasting in flames to this.
That led to Alex’s official position on fluorescent lighting, one of the most sinister inventions ever, especially when it flickers:
I think we’re getting close to the end of the universe. That’s what I think when I see fluorescent lights.
Boring settings are the advantage, he says. When the strange thing finally shows up, it really stands out. His metaphor: a tattooed, pierced, sweaty guy sneering in a mosh pit is normal and even a little wholesome. Put him at a kid’s birthday party in a park, and you call the cops.
Meaghan’s counter was our favorite exchange of the episode. “Or you could just invite them to hang out. Maybe he’s just hungry.” Alex, immediately: “Maybe Baphomet just wants a friend. Come on, Baphomet. We’ll fix you a plate.“
As for the book, Infernal Tramps ranges from flash fiction under a thousand words to novelettes near nine thousand. A sentient button plant. A pest deterrent system that regenerates a maintenance company’s employees. A woman keeping her mutant babies in a pickup truck while she hunts down the man who abandoned them. The pitch he has said many times and will keep saying:
If you are seeking the experience of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker smoking bath salts together and then writing short stories, I have that experience for you.
Arthur’s response was ours, too. “I’m sold.“
The stories do not connect, so you can start anywhere. Alex gave us three doors. For short, punchy, and kind of funny, start with A Woman of Distinction.
For dark, start with A New World Basement.
For weird, go straight to The EP Implant. You can find it on Amazon (search Infernal Tramps by Alex Grass, spelled like the green grass), which he describes as “basically everything I thought worth assembling as a minor monument to my ego.“
The cover is a warped vaudeville poster, and it is genuinely unsettling, which brought us to Alex’s closing thought about time doing the work for you.