THE HORROR OF MY LIFE BY GRADY HENDRIX

grady hendrix 

BIO
Grady Hendrix writes books and movies like Mohawk, Satanic Panic, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Paperbacks from Hell, and the upcoming Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

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WEBSITE LINKS
http://www.gradyhendrix.com/

THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING

When I was a kid, my family lived in England for a year. We rented this big house in Dulwich with a hippie living in the basement and a photographer living in the attic, and this enormous library with floor to ceiling shelves. Up on one of the top shelves, I found a copy of this black book with a gold mask embossed on the cover called Folklore, Myths, and Legends of Britain and every page depicted witches being hung, Catholics being tortured, ghosts crawling out of marshes. I knew my parents didn’t want me to read it, so I’d climb up the shelves like a monkey, drag it down, and crouch behind the sofa and pore over those pages dripping with carnage and mayhem again and again because it felt like a travel guide to Great Britain in 1978.

THE FIRST HORROR FILM I REMEMBER WATCHING

Although it’s about leprechauns, Darby O’Gill and the Little People ends with a skin-crawling, crazy-making encounter with a banshee. They showed it at Peter Mansfield’s birthday party and I lost my mind with sheer terror and couldn’t even think of the horrible, caterwauling wail of the banshee for years afterwards without falling apart into gibbering terror.

THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are the two great horror novels of the 20th Century. There is no argument. They’re both haunted house books but one’s about loneliness and alienation between people and one is about an America haunted by its history of violence and that pretty much sums up the 20th Century.

THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME

Return of the Living Dead is not just the greatest horror film, but one of the two greatest films, of all time. When it came out, everyone got to see it but me because I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies, so I had to hear about it for years before accidentally catching it on cable a couple of Halloween’s later and it blew me away because unlike other movies, it fulfilled every single promise it made to its audience. Every single plot element and character is taken to its logical conclusion and the biggest mass murderer in the movie turns out to be the President of the United States. Someone described it to me once as “campy” and I really don’t think it is. It’s stupid, and funny, and horrifying, and disgusting, and hopeless, and cathartic, and depressing all at once. Sounds like real life to me.

THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME

I stumbled across Ken Greenhall while writing Paperbacks from Hell and realized that he was the heir to Shirley Jackson’s quiet, sinister, self-assured voice with its chilly razor’s edge of precision. His first three horror novels are perfect. There’s Elizabeth, written under the pen name Jessica Hamilton, about a teenage girl who believes she’s a witch and has killed her parents, there’s Hell Hound, about a dog who kills its owners when they don’t live up to his expectations, and there’s Childgrave which is hard to summarize but is about spirit photography, and classical harp players, and smalltown New York, and God. The stories Greenhall tells are about lonely, possibly insane, people and animals, yoked to a writing style that’s totally and completely sane. The frission that creates can get you drunk. I loved his work but it’s his last novel, Lenore, which convinced me he’s the greatest writer of our times. It’s about the freed slave who posed for Rubens’ 1617 painting, “Four Studies of the Head of a Negro”, in Amsterdam and it’s one of the funniest and most surprising historical novels I’ve ever read. It could stand next to anything by Hilary Mantel with pride. Ken died, forgotten, with his books all out of print. Valancourt has been bringing them back and he’s just waiting to be rediscovered.

THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

Hector Garrido’s cover of The Little People by John Christopher is what happens when a batshit painter meets a batshit cover: an Irish castle, overflowing with Nazi leprechauns like some kind of horrible pinata. It’s a cover that changed my life and got me to write Paperbacks from Hell.

THE BEST FILM POSTER OFF ALL TIME

The poster for Stephen Chow’s King of Comedy is one of the most dazzling, hilarious, and deadpan things I’ve ever seen.

THE BEST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

I’m going to avoid trick questions.

THE WORST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

Definitely a trick question.

THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME

Return of the Living Dead. Clearly.

THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

Charles Portiss’ True Grit is the Great American Novel. I get that there’s an argument to be made for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that’s the Great American Novel of the 19th century, all about exploration, and finding yourself, and boys on a river, horsing around. True Grit is told in the clipped, clinical voice of a 14-year-old girl out to avenge the murder of her father, but it’s really about the hard men and women we needed to tame the American frontier, and how unnecessary and embarrassing they became once we don’t need them anymore. It’s the American book about tallest poppy syndrome, and it speaks to the American 20th Century in a way Huckleberry Finn doesn’t.

THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME

Vernon Lee. Essentially, Henry James stole her seat at the table, which is ironic because she loved to troll Henry James. But Vernon Lee wrote beautiful stories about ghosts and the occult, blending them with psychological dissolution, dreams, madness, and memories, in much the same way Henry James did, only without the feeling of timidity that James approaches the world with. Lee’s adventurous spirit, always hungry to learn more, to see more, informs her books, and her sentences come without the accumulation of dust or the tortured constipation of James. If she was a man, we’d read her A Phantom Lover rather than his Turn of the Screw.

THE BOOK / FILM THAT SACRED ME THE MOST

I saw the “garden birth” sequence in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers when I was way too young and it confronted me with the horror of reproduction and scared me away from sex for a long, long time to come.

THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT

I’m working on a book about kung fu movies coming to America, then I’ve got two novels due, so it’s non-stop over here. But right now I’ve got The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires coming out and I just had to postpone my entire book tour, so I’ve got to figure out a way to let people know it’s hitting bookstores on April 7, right in the middle of the Red Death.
 
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is published by Quirk Books.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires: A Novel by Grady Hendrix

Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this '90s-set horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town, perfect for murderinos and fans of Stephen King.
 
Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.

One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. 
 
Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

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