The American Grady Hendrix (Charleston, South Carolina–1972) is one of the most representative writers of horror literature today and the one who is selling the most books of this genre in the United States. One of his first novels was best-seller Horrorstör (2014), about a haunted IKEA store. A work that perfectly explains the reason for its success: fusing horror with satire.
After chatting at FilBo 2024 with the Colombian writer Miguel Mendoza Luna about the fascination that terror produces, Grady Hendrix tries to explain the formula for his success in this interview. “When I watch a movie like Dracula, I start to think: how can he live only on blood? Blood does not have enough calories. And then I start to think what else a vampire would need to survive, besides blood. “You apply the real world to horror traditions and you get something new that’s fun.”
Grady Hendrix at FilBo 2024
Hendrix wears a red cloth jacket, a white shirt and a tie the same color as the jacket. The typical clothing of a gringo real estate agent, very consistent with the performance he will have later at the Book Fair. With a clumsy and funny command of Spanish, he will project a PowerPoint presentation with Suggestions for owners of cursed properties: central plot of his most recent novel, How to sell a haunted house (2023).
The 50-year-old writer answers this note in the middle of the FilBo mixed zone. People don’t harass him because he is just making himself known. Ediciones Minotauro, a fantastic subsidiary of Editorial Planeta, began in 2023 to translate his works into Spanish and distribute them in Spanish-speaking markets. That is why Grady Hendrix has gained popularity in countries like Mexico and Spain, where he has come to be compared to the legendary Stephen King.
The low profile that Grady Hendrix has, for the moment, does not prevent dozens of people, especially young people, from improvising a line on the side of the Corferias Gastronomic Tent to buy his available novels, such as The exorcism of my best friend (2016)We sold our souls (2018), Support group for final girls (2021) or Book Club Guide to Killing Vampires (2020).
Things you didn’t know about Grady Hendrix
Hendrix debuted in horror literature more than a decade ago, after working as a journalist and contributor to Playboy, the New York Post and the New York Sun. His first genre literary works were Occupy Space and Satan Loves You, published in 2012. Thanks to the test Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of Fictional Horror in the ’70s and ’80s, won the 2017 Bram Stoker Prize for Nonfiction.
Currently, Grady Hendrix has at least twenty horror and fantasy works, including novels, screenplays and short story books. However, his connection with lyrics began in adolescence. The divorce of his father and his mother, when he was 13 years old, made him spend a lot of time in public libraries and find his writing vocation.
«I started writing in seventh grade. They asked me for a love poem and I wrote one about garbage and how much I was in love with garbage. Already in the 90s I began to write professionally and later I wrote many scripts for theater.remembers Grady Hendrix with humor and capacity for synthesis.
The terror of Grady Hendrix
Deautomating terror is one of the keys to Grady Hendrix’s writing. “The idea we have of exorcisms is that of an old man yelling things at a girl tied to a bed.” Seeking to break that idea, he published The exorcism of my best friend. A comic drama of sorts coming-of-age, that seeks to transcend commonplaces with elements that rescue nostalgia for the 80s in a pop key. A book with enough impact for the streaming platform Amazon Prime Video to adapt it into a film in 2022.
«Horror movies became therapy. Midsommar It’s therapy. And I miss monster movies,” explains Grady Hendrix regarding the quotas of nostalgia that he seeks to fill with his literary fiction. His favorite movies are, precisely, from the eighties: «Beijing Opera Bluesby Tsui Hark, from 1986. And The return of the living deadby Dan O’Bannon, from 1985. I think they are the best movies ever made.
Another fundamental aspect in Grady Hendrix’s work is houses as creators of claustrophobic atmospheres. His understanding of this typology applies sufficiently in How to sell a haunted house, a novel where space and family become a Gothic refuge and last remnant of the body and consciousness. Regarding real estate terror, “the bedroom or bathroom are the most vulnerable places in the house because they are places where you are asleep or naked,” he highlights, convinced.
Due to the above, it is justified that one of Grady Hendrix’s favorite books is about the queen of haunted houses. «There are books that I love. We Have Always Lived In The Castleby Shirley Jackson. True Grid, by Charles Portis. They are two books that I love. Also, the saga of Michael McDowell, Blackwater; and When Darkness Loves Usby Liz Engstrom.
Reading clubs for vampire hunters. Self-help groups for survivors of serial killers. Instructions for selling cursed houses. Taking horror triggers such as satanic panic, heavy metal or possessed dolls and turning them around is the ingenious key of this horror expert, who in a few years rose to be the best-selling author of his genre in the most competitive literary market. of the world.
The success of Grady Hendrix
According to Penguin Random House’s best-selling book filter in the US, under the label Gothic & Horror, Grady Hendrix is the only author with four books in the top-20, in a list where the writer Laurell K. Hamilton, born in Arkansas, and the Mexican, naturalized Canadian, Silvia Moreno-García, also stand out. More experienced names like Bret Easton-Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk appear in the top 50.
“The appearance of Grady Hendrix on the scene of horror literature was a fresh breeze, almost literally: he came to bring lightness, humor and intelligence,” notes the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez on the back cover of How to sell a haunted house.
However, the writer from Charleston, South Carolina, is clear that beneath that layer of confluence between the horror archetype and comic rationality there is a deeper seam that gives true meaning to his work. «The monster is us. The terror is us. The humans. Because we are broken and poisoned. But, at the same time, we are good, we help each other. And despite that, there is no hope. “We are destined to go where we cannot leave and become the monster.”
For about ten minutes, Grady Hendrix seems to have a short, concise answer to everything he’s asked. However, in the last response he sounds hesitant, but also sincere. «Why should people read me? Well, because I need the money (laughs). Really, the only thing a book of mine should do is entertain for a few hours. Take you out of this world. And if that’s what you want and you like horror, give it a chance.”close the best-seller American, far from the intellectual posturing that is usually seen at book fairs.
