Infernal Tramps by Alex Grass
Alex Grass‘s Infernal Tramps is a collection of seventeen stories. It is a relentless, gleefully unhinged tour through body horror, cosmic dread, and the menace of everyday consumer culture.
The opener, “The Tezcat Apparatus,” is a perfect thesis statement for the book. What begins as a folksy exchange between a suburban gardener and a door-to-door salesman peddling a pest-control gadget curdles, almost without warning, into something stranger and sinister — a mechanism of deception, a hint of the inhuman wearing a human disguise and a punchline that lands like a trapdoor opening under your feet. Grass has a gift for this kind of slow-burn reveal: he lets the mundane sit just long enough for the reader to get comfortable before yanking the floor away. It’s a technique that recurs throughout the collection and each story finds its own angle of attack.
Where the Ordinary Turns Monstrous
That range is the book’s strongest asset. Titles like “The EP™ Implant” and “A Woman of Distinction” suggest Grass is just as interested in skewering consumerism, vanity and institutional rot as he is in delivering scares and the strongest pieces in the collection do both at once, using the fantastic as a lens rather than a costume.
At just over 230 pages spread across seventeen stories, the pacing is brisk — several entries are lean enough to read in a single sitting, which suits horror short fiction well. The prose itself is confident and unafraid of a strange, specific image (a salesman’s glove sewn shut over missing fingers; a caboose materializing out of fog like something dredged rather than driven), and Grass trusts his readers to sit with ambiguity instead of over-explaining the mechanics of his monsters.
If you’re the kind of reader who wants your horror comfortable, tidy and resolved by the last page, Infernal Tramps will happily disagree with you. But if you want short fiction that’s willing to be genuinely strange — unpredictable in structure, unsentimental in its violence, and sneakily thoughtful about the everyday horrors (debt, loneliness, vanity, grief) hiding underneath the supernatural ones — this collection delivers in spades. Alex Grass isn’t just following the weird-fiction tradition here; he’s actively adding to it. This is short horror fiction that isn’t afraid to get strange.
About Alex Grass:
Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His recent work has appeared in Maudlin House, The Genre Society, Macabre Magazine, Trembling With Fear, and elsewhere. Alex was nominated for the 2022 Kirkus Prize.
