Twisted Minds: Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is a name that many familiar with horror should know. He not only writes horror, but he’s also one of horror’s most visible ambassadors. He could have just sat back and enjoyed the royalties coming in from three great novels that he’s published, but he’s also working to increase horror’s visibility, particularly among librarians. He’s created a nonfiction book Paperbacks From Hell, which details the horror paperback boom of the 70’s and 80’s, and has published some of the books he mentions in Paperbacks as part of his new imprint. Along with making numerous visits to horror podcasts, he has even worked with Becky Spratford and her Summer Scares program to bring horror to libraries. The man is busy, but we should never forget that the man knows horror and knows how to write.

The cover of his debut novel Horrorstör was enough to get me interested. Having gone to IKEA many times, usually because my wife promised Swedish meatballs at the end of any shopping trip, I was familiar with the IKEA catalog, which the cover tried to emulate. What made me want to read are the haunted house tropes within the image (for example, a disembodied face or a crack in the wall). As I read, I saw many things that kept me reading. Sure there were the furniture diagrams that progressed into diagrams of torture devices. But underneath all that was a solid ghost story serious enough to be actually terrifying in spots. He even had a sympathetic protagonist, a young woman who is dealing with her own non-supernatural crisis: How does she find her way into adulthood when she’s trapped in a workforce that doesn’t seem particularly welcoming?

So Grady Hendrix knows about conflict and character, which he continues to demonstrate in his next novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which, like Horrorstör, hooked me with its quirky premise. Best friends Abby and Gretchen face high school and the 80's together, but the ultimate test of their friendship is when Gretchen is possessed by a demon. Like Joe Lansdale, a personal favorite of mine, Hendrix goes beyond merely presenting a crazy situation and the chaos that ensues. Exorcism is one of my favorite novels because it is so grounded in the relationship between these two young women, showing why indeed one would risk everything to save the other’s eternal soul. Like Elvis in "Bubba Hotep" discovering life’s meaning when he had to fight for it, Abby learns just how powerful the bonds of friendship can be, pushing this title beyond an excuse to have cover art like an 80’s VHS tape but giving a surprisingly tender story as to how friendships make us our better selves.

This exploration of friendships continues in his latest We Sold Our Souls, as Kris Pulaski, former guitarist for the heavy metal band Dürt Würk discovers that her band’s former lead singer Terry made a Faustian deal with not only his soul but all of theirs. This novel has an epic quest feel to it as Kris tries to regain what she didn’t even know she lost, but she also represents one of Hendrix’s most tough-as-nails protagonist in the face of adversity. The passing of her band has meant that life had passed Kris by, leaving her 46 and a hotel clerk, not where she saw her life going at all. She is constantly disrespected and underestimated, and there are times even she doesn’t feel like she’s up to the challenges set before her. Her one weapon is the literal power of rock and roll in the form of a song that represents her anger and grit. What keeps me, and will probably continue to keep me, coming back to Hendrix’s work is his ultimate message of hope within his books, particularly his more recent novels.  That message is whatever horrors life throws our way, the human spirit is able to rise above them.

New Arrival: Paul Tremblay's Growing Things and Other Stories

There was a time where written communication was dominated by paper and ink, but the way we communicate has changed drastically from the development and integration of new mediums in our society. Want to get a message across? You can write it longhand, type a letter on a computer or on your phone, or even make a video using that phone. Just as Bram Stoker used diary entries to tell the story of Dracula, writers are more and more finding new ways to weave a narrative. One of the forerunners of this trend is Paul Tremblay, who has used everything from blog posts and diary entries to create spellbinding novels that fit well within the genre label of Weird Fiction. His current collection Growing Things and Other Stories shows his willingness to experiment.

Tremblay has a gift for looking at a story not as a linear climb up a mountain until the reader reaches the climax at its top; rather, his stories are like seeing the moving parts, the gears grinding, the levers lifting, and letting the reader see how his narrative structure work. The pieces within all of Tremblay’s stories can come from, for example, fairy tales, the Apocalypse, and a disintegrating family (“Growing Things”). His stories can also be built from seemingly innocuous photographs (“Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport”), from literary discussion about non-existent stories (“Notes from ‘The Barn in the Wild’”), and even from the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format many remember reading as children (“A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken”). The terror he generates in these stories comes not from a killer’s hand at one’s throat or the roaring of a chainsaw, but they come in the more subtle terrors of a neighbor’s bizarre behavior, the oppressive quiet of a house that is currently uninhabited, or conversations had that seemed innocent until one has time to process them. Tremblay refers to an author, obviously himself, as “Mr. Ambiguous Horror” in his story “Notes from the Dog Walkers” and the title fits him so well. The endings may not be the hard, definitive endings that some readers like to have as signals the terror is over. Rather, Tremblay’s stories are meant to stick with you and make you a little more wary of the shadows. These stories are a great selection for readers who love classic ghost stories like M. R. James where the horror is like a slowly rolling fog from the moors, but with a clear American postmodern bent.

Have You Read This? Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias

As a librarian, the desire to categorize has become, at this point, etched into my DNA. Alphabetical order, Dewey Decimal, “Nothing comes before something,” and other methods of putting things in the proper order is almost soothing in its simplicity. Defining a genre, on the other hand, is not so neat and tidy. Writers are now taking more risks, blending genres, upsetting traditional tropes, and books are becoming less easy to categorize. I’m personally okay with that if the outcome is books like Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias. His book is a blend of crime, lyrical poetry, and supernatural horror he has dubbed “barrio-noir.”

The book doesn’t have a straight-ahead, tightly focused narrative. Rather, Iglesias uses a mosaic narrative, presenting character studies of mothers, sons, criminals, and even ghosts to tell individual stories of need, of revenge, of horrible circumstances, and of determination to find better. I had the privilege of hearing Iglesias read a section from this book and hearing him read it, and his passion that was evident as he read, gave me a sense of how beautiful and meaningful his choice of words is, particularly how he blends Spanish and English while delivering beautiful descriptions and soaring sentences in both languages (Honestly, I only had four spread-apart semesters of Spanish and only recognize a few words, but I understood enough to get the gist thanks to the context he provided). However, understanding Spanish isn’t a requirement; one could read enough to see how Iglesias uses language to paint pictures in the mind both visceral and beautiful.

It might seem pretentious of Iglesias to name his own genre, but there is literally nothing out there that’s like him, and if anyone deserves to be their own genre, it’s him. Much like Joe Lansdale, whose sentence structure and turns of phrase are uniquely his, Iglesias has blended all his influences, all his loves, his observances of the human condition, and created something that no one else can copy. While there might not be a barrio-noir section in your local bookstore, it still pays to get to know this genre through its sole practitioner, Mr. Gabino Iglesias.