Intensity: 🩸🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written by Alex Grass
Short stories can be a good way to ease into horror; just read one or two and then take a break to make sure you’re not freaking yourself out too much. However, that plan won’t really work for the collection captured in Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror. Every single one of the seventeen tales is some creepy, spooky stuff!
The official description states:
A boy discovers his father’s oracular grotesque in a secret dungeon below their family funeral home.
An heirloom collar transforms Philadelphia into a city that worships a dead dog.
A video game dominates the market for years and then disappears, except for one man’s memories of its horrors.
A mother with a trunkful of hungry, inhuman babies tracks down the family that abandoned them.
A wealthy young woman receives a surgical implant that delivers more than just a shapely body.
Step into a world of fleshly titillation and fresh terror, a dimension of blood and consequence. But buyer beware! Crack the spine and these dark tales are not so easily forgotten.
Turn back now, if you can, or else become one of the…
Infernal Tramps!
From the 2-page “Rats” to the 32-page “Finding Erland”, each story has its own flavor of ick. My favorite was “Meeting Ivor Voelman”, which has an interesting twist on the theme of un-being.
And the one that made me search the internet for funny cat videos before I could go to bed was “Odd Egg”.
Overall, Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror is a fun read. My only quibble is the author’s penchant for extra-complex sentence structure. Sometimes a description would coil around itself so much I would lose the thread by the end.
This is author Alex Grass’ fifth publication and his first collection of short stories. Buy it at Amazon in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle format.
Review by Kristi Zilbauer.