Fictitious Podcast Interview with Author Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is the author of Horrorstör, the only novel about a haunted Scandinavian furniture store you’ll ever need. NPR selected it as one of the best books of 2014 and it is being turned into a television show. His last novel was My Best Friend’s Exorcism, about demonic possession, friendship, and the Eighties. It’s basically Beaches meets The Exorcist and it caused the Wall Street Journal to call him “a national treasure” and received rave reviews from everyone from Kirkus to Southern Living. He also wrote Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom in the Seventies and Eighties that followed the success of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Thomas Tryon’s The Other. It won a Bram Stoker Award. His new novel is We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal take on the Faust legend, out now from Quirk Books.
Grady used to be a journalist. He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival, but he is not responsible for the bad parts of it. He is also not Asian. For years he was a regular film critic for the New York Sun but then it went out of business. He has written for Playboy Magazine, Slate, The Village Voice, the New York Post, Film Comment, and Variety. He has a hard time making up his mind.
There is a science fiction book called Occupy Space that he is the author of, and also a fantasy book called Satan Loves You which he wrote as well. Along with his BFF from high school, Katie Crouch, he is the co-author of the YA series, The Magnolia League. He co-authored Dirt Candy: A Cookbook, the first graphic novel cookbook in America, with his wife and Ryan Dunlavey. It’s now in its seventh printing. His fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and the anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.
About We Sold Our Souls
Kris Pulaski’s metal band was about to break big in the Nineties when their lead singer sold them out and went off to become a solo act sensation, leaving his old friends behind to rot in rural Pennsylvania. Decades later, Kris has hung up her Gibson and finally gotten used to being a footnote in someone else’s success story when she learns the secret to their former lead singer’s success: he didn’t sell his soul to dark forces for fame and glory — he sold Kris’s.
They told Kris not to be angry, they told her to be a good girl and not cause trouble, but now she’s pissed off and hitting the road one last time to find her old bandmates and confront the man who ruined her life. It’s a journey through an America darker than any Mordor Tolkien could devise and along the way she’ll learn that the occult forces that bought her soul aren’t corny devils carrying pitchforks, but the conspiracy behind the conspiracy, the shadowy men who rule our lives, the secret committees who put sedatives in our water and watch us from satellites, who’ve transformed our world into a vast feeding pen where the struggle, sweat, and fear of the 99% provides sustenance for the 1% who keep us asleep.
Sometimes it’s not what you’re fighting for that matters, it’s the fact that you’re still fighting at all, and Kris Pulaski has never walked away from a fight in her life. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a surveillance mad, prescription popping, paranoid country where only a girl with a guitar can save us from eternal damnation. After all, there has to be something in this world that’s not for sale.
We Sold Our Souls is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and wherever books are sold.
