In the dim light of a family funeral home, a boy stumbles upon his father's oracular grotesque hidden in a secret dungeon. Elsewhere, an antique spiked collar remakes Philadelphia into a city that worships a dead dog. These are among the premises that open Alex Grass's Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror, published today by Dickinson Publishing Group.
The collection assembles 17 short stories that draw on the classic furniture of horror without apology. A video game conquers the market only to vanish, lingering solely in one man's memory. A mother carries a trunk filled with hungry inhuman babies as she hunts the family that cast them aside. In another tale a penal colony warden offers a murderer his freedom if he can find an antidote to poisoned wine. A wealthy young woman receives a surgical implant that delivers rather more than an improved figure. Each premise twists ordinary life into something unsettling, often grotesque, always rooted in recognisably human impulses.
The book arrives with a gentle warning: these dark tales may not be easily forgotten and could change the reader. Advance praise has called the stories potent, capable of provoking and repelling in equal measure. One blurb captures the flavour well:
Neither his face nor his lips moved when he laughed. It was more a plague of laughter than the sound of it; a pervasion of the hearer's mind by hypnotic disease.
Grass, born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now living in Brooklyn with his wife and three children, has produced a volume that feels like a deliberate step away from contemporary pressures. His work recalls the feverish invention of earlier masters who trusted the genre's capacity to explore transformation, moral ambiguity and the bizarre without needing to lecture. The result is a reminder that horror, at its best, enriches culture by returning us to fundamental questions of dread, consequence and the limits of the human.
Grass himself offers a colourful description of the book's spirit.
I would like to think that if David Cronenberg and Clive Barker got together and smoked bath salts they would come up with something like Infernal Tramps.The comparison suggests the visceral, boundary-testing quality readers can expect.
In an era when much fiction strains to reflect every passing ideological current, a collection such as this stands out for its commitment to imaginative storytelling on its own terms. Its grotesque circumstances, moments of satire and carefully wrought prose invite the reader into a space where narrative craft still matters more than messaging. Such books quietly affirm the dignity of literature that respects its audience's intelligence and its own traditions.