An Interview with Alex Grass On His Writing and His Upcoming Short Story Collection 'Infernal Tramps'

Alex Grass is the author of several horror, SF and dark fantasy novels based in Brooklyn, NYC. His new book "Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror", a short story collection of seventeen short stories that I reviewed here, will be published this summer, on July 15th, by the Dickinson Publishing Group. I was mesmerized and delighted by this collection and even more delighted when Alex accepted an interview with Protean Depravity... 

Alex, the titular short story Infernal Tramps surprises with a very unique setting, but also quite a flabbergasting plot, in that a main character finds and raises a creature he finds on railway tracks which grow up to be weird, Germanic doppelgänger hobos, tramps.

Especially as a German, this is such an interesting story to read and raised the questions for me how? Why? Considering your command of the German or in general Germanic languages is excellent, what is your connection / your interest in the central European language/culture?

I was born in Harrisburg, which is the capitol of Pennsylvania, the state with the most people of German origin in the United States. When I was a baby my mother hired a German immigrant named Maria, who’d come to America after meeting a GI stationed near her hometown. Maria is one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known, and I love her very much.

Then, when my family moved to Indiana in the early nineties, we had a family friend named Mike, whose mother Trudy would babysit me and sometimes speak to me in German. I must’ve retained something, I guess.

Now, if you’re asking the how and why of “Infernal Tramps” the story, that’s a harder question to answer. Sometimes, I start out with only the germ of an idea and then flesh it out during revisions. Why, on that day, I thought of a deformed giant of a woman mysteriously appearing on a train, I can’t say.

While driving my son to school, I saw graffiti on the side of a very tall building with no fire escapes, and I wondered what kind of person spray paints from so high up that, if they fell, the impact would obliterate them.

Usually, I see something like that, and the just idea comes to me.

You have a very singular, very unique “weirdness” that feel partly like some kind of folkloric fairy tale for adults, if that makes sense. How would you describe your horror and where do you get your inspiration from? 

Hypnogogic Freakery. Everything’s weird as shit, halfway between dreams and the waking world. Like if Clive Barker and David Cronenberg got together to write stories after getting high on bath salts.

Some of it is environment, I’m sure. My dad took me to see Terminator 2 two months after my sixth birthday. He was always taking me to movies where I was the only kid in the theater. He didn’t give a shit. If people looked at him sideways, he’d just be like, hey, mind your business. He’s a reformed reprobate now. I’m also a reformed reprobate.

It’s in the genes, maybe.

My mother was always giving me books or buying me books, and some of those were pretty strange. She bought me a collection of fairy tales about The Wise Men of Chelm. Chelm is a town populated entirely by idiots. Like a man sues a fish, and the court sentences the fish to death by drowning. That kind of stuff.

I think I read Cujo when I was twelve, or maybe younger. So, there’s something there, too.

Connected to the question above, what do you like to read? Do you have any favorite authors?

I can tell you which authors are my most recent favorites. Here are the absolute ass-kickers in terms of short story collections in the last two or three years, the real cream of my library’s crop: Charnel Glamour by Mark Samuels (really, all of Mark Samuels’ work), A Different Darkness by Luigi Musolino, The Secret Life of Insects by Bernardo Esquinca, Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon, Songs the Dead Men Sing by George R.R. Martin, both The Black Maybe and This’ll Make Things a Little Easier by Attila Veres, Cruise of Shadows by Jean Ray, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe, Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas and, last but not least, Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories by Reggie Oliver. Oh, and Books of Blood. Clive Barker’s short fiction is wonderful. 

The stories in Infernal Tramps are divided by illustrations, but in my digital advanced copy I was unable to find an artist. Can you tell us a little more about who the artist is and who chose them and their order of appearance?

All those illustrations are public domain images I took from the internet and perverted using basic Macbook software, Preview and Photos. I might have sent you an advance copy while I was still cobbling together copyright expiration attributions and creator waivers for the original images, but now they’re in the back.

The cover of Infernal Tramps, for instance, is based on an old vaudeville poster. But the only way you could ever tell that my cover was based on that old poster would be by putting both images side-to-side.

Do you have a favorite among your own short stories?

I’d probably choose "The Golden Mile". But if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I’ll have a different answer.

My absolute highlight in your collection was “Ever Shall They Feed”, a story that begins with the pranks between a father and a son, mentions the history of a Central European librarian and ends in a mortuary among flesh eating monsters. Sheer amazing! I generally felt like that’s a pattern in your stories, that there are many stories within one frame narrative, can you say something about this technique and why you choose it?

I think the preference is because, as my wife puts it, “You love the Lonely Man.” And I do. I love the Lonely Man, and I love the Lonely Woman. I can’t say why.

Of course there’s something sad about social isolation, but there’s something fascinating about how characters weather that loneliness, too.

Like Mrs. Gulyash, the librarian from “Ever Shall They Feed”. She got a bum deal. Her husband imprisoned, probably killed, her family ruined. I imagine her never remarrying, not finding many friends after coming to America. The odd woman out.

That moment at the end of “Ever Shall They Feed” where Beno and Mrs. Gulyash see each other and wave—that’s the Lonely Woman and a very young Lonely Man, both reaching out from their isolation, commiserating, acknowledging the other. That last exchange between them, I just loved it. It’s one of those scenes where you know what they’re saying to one another without either one saying a word. 

Your previous work consists mainly of horror/ dark fantasy novels. What made you write a short story collection and which do you prefer writing, novels or short stories?

Short stories. But again, that’s the current preference. When I wrote my first novels, I would never have even considered writing short stories. I hardly ever read them back then. I think maybe I reread “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, and I only read that because my youngest brother emailed it to me and asked if I’d ever read it before. I remembered reading it in middle school.

Good storytelling is good storytelling. And if you can manage it in a (good) short story, it means you can hold the reader’s interest while maintaining an economy of words and short runway for getting character development to take off. Which is why flash fiction is so hard. But, when done right, so satisfying.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell your readers, about this book (publication day July 15th) or upcoming projects we can anticipate?

“Underpromise and overdeliver.” I won’t say anything about the future but promise I’ll try my best to write something worth reading (unless I stop writing completely).

Oh, and read my book, please.

And thank you, İnci. If you’re ever in New York, make sure to drop by. 

Thank you so much, Alex!