When I was a child in my early teens, perhaps as a way to rebel against the classic fairy tales I was reading growing up, I found a special kind of fascinating escape in stories and books which featured peculiar characters, the weirder the better, the more interesting for me, going through unconventional adventures, thus providing fresh outcomes, outlooks and lessons than your habitual happily ever after. I could lose myself for hours in those stories, utterly hypnotized.
In the
following years I’ve encountered that same captivating dreaminess in
many a book, and lately it winked at me in Alex Grass’ new short story
collection Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror. The seventeen stories of the collection are seventeen little trap doors leading to fantastic worlds.
“The smallest dreads soak my bones. Be it the paranoid certainty of
being watched in a grocery store line, the nagging thought of an
unknown debt, a vague notion of an undiagnosable illness coring out my
organs. My fears are in my marrow.”
It is those little dreads that creep through all of Grass’
stories, but they can take bigger dimensions too, quite great depending
on your own fears; short impressions of vermin, eggs hatching to become
monsters, strange things happening every time an author publishes a
book, hell hounds dressed as clowns… Each story starts with a strange
occurrence or situation that gets even weirder in the course of the
story, stretching the limits of that already uncanny situation.
In my absolute highlight Ever Shall They Feed
a son who wants to get back to his father for playing a rather unfunny
prank on him discovers a whole secret life his dad is living and it’s
going unexpected places, and it all starts with a little librarian in
Central-East Europe.
"I’m going to die now, David."
The prose is impeccable, really, the weird feels genuinely
weird, and the stories authentic. Meanwhile glimpses of social
commentary, such as people transferred to internment camps to pay their
hospital bills, glance at you from between the lines, and the author’s
correct use of various Germanic languages is impressive - too many
authors make so many mistakes when using foreign languages in their
work! I’m glad to see that Alex Grass has a whole body of work that
waits to be discovered.
I’d like to thank the author for reaching out and Book Sirens for providing me a review copy. My opinions are my own.
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