Book review: Alex Grass presents his unhinged, though somewhat unbalanced, short story collection Infernal Tramps
- Jonathan
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
“If promises we’ll only weep, if promises were meant to keep.”
The horror genre has always promised the potential for the weird and macabre. That promise gets delivered in Infernal Tramps¸ a collection of new and already-published tales from the twistedly creative mind of Alex Grass, author of A Boy's Hammer and Black River Lantern.
Described as “tales of weird terror,” Infernal Tramps is a range of spidery eggs, psychotic authors, and memory-transferring milk that stretches over 200 pages. But like most ranges, it has its high points and low points.
Grass uses some of the most refined language I’ve ever read in a contemporary horror work (despite an overuse of “whore” and its connotations), and the way he uses it to tell stories of odd and inventive terror makes for an intriguing combination. The language is quite descriptive and elegant, combining phrases like “Neither fox nor bobcat shouldn’t delight in so easy a meal” with “placental mucus the color of marmalade.” These stories are also quite original; many feeling like the result of a pair of 6-prompted dice being rolled.
But for many of the stories, the strengths lie only in mental illustrations and not the plot direction. They could tease a neat idea that doesn’t get fully expressed.
This does not completely work against the book’s favor, though. Some of the shorter 5 or 6-page stories, such as “The Vixenly Hexer,” make effective use of show over tell because of their brief length. However, some other brief stories, such as “Rats,” still get jumbled in descriptions and emotion over narrative, being more akin to poetry over prose.
One woefully under-expressed story was “Pujkamaunka Splash,” a tale about a man recalling the titular "lost videogame" that was widely popular for a brief time in the early 90’s before almost all traces (and apparent memory) of the game vanished. He recounts his grandfather taking him to a mall for the game's launch, which ended up being far more horrific than he imagined it would be. Despite the gnarly Clive Barker-esque descriptions, which are prominent in most of the collection, it fell flat.
In contrast, one of the best stories that blended showing and telling was “The EPTM Implant.” This story features a wealthy socialite who receives an Esurientem Petat (EP) ImplantTM, the first ever “Consumer-Adjustable Internal Buttock Enhancement Device (CAIBED). This story—no pun intended—does not fall flat like “Pujkamaunka Splash" does. With a protagonist written to be unlikeable and a clear comment on beauty standards and social media influencing, it humorously utilizes post-The Substance body horror.
While the collection does struggle to express itself at parts, it’s clear that Grass is at least attempting to satirize aspects of modern life. While the point doesn’t always hit the target the way “The EPTM Implant” does, the awareness is obvious.
An outlier of the collection that I enjoyed was “The Black Gaucho of Revendication,” a western-style set in the town of Revendication and featuring men chewing and smoking a powerful tobacco-like root. The structure carried undertones of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and mentioned curious instances “Terminal Age” and “Final atomic desolation" that imply something beyond a traditional Western.
But my favorite story was “If Promise Were Meant to Keep,” a story of an alcoholic imprisoned in the daunting Lurcu’s Gate penal colony for murdering his wife. After being given a delicious meal of steak and (poisoned) wine by the warden, he must race to the other side of the colony to collect the antidote, having to defend against an unexpected pursuer.
In my opinion, this was the strongest story of the collection. It evoked a darker version of The Labyrinth and the Minotaur. Grass uses his well-established descriptive language to convey a darkening, dreadful setting in which a man is both racing against time and enemy to survive his ordeal and his haunting memories, which factor into his predicament. The mixture of unsettling imagery with the narration of the character’s emotional turmoil was a well-mixed cocktail that I wish more of the stories served.
Overall, Infernal Tramps is an original collection of grotesque and twisted terror that won’t quench everyone’s thirsts but will undoubtedly pique the interests of subgenre horror enthusiasts (body horror, psychological horror, extreme horror, etc.). Alex Grass invites us into his bizarre dreamscape of killer apparatuses, deadly fast diets and 500-year-old writers and doesn’t hold back.
Infernal Tramps will be released July 15th, 2026 by Dickinson Publishing Group.
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