Grady Hendrix Books in Order

If you want Southern horror with heart: My Best Friend's Exorcism → The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
If you want big high-concept scares: Horrorstör → How to Sell a Haunted House
If you like slasher movie energy: The Final Girl Support Group
If you want music-fueled horror: We Sold Our Souls
If you want nonfiction first: Paperbacks from Hell → These Fists Break Bricks

Grady Hendrix was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in the Lowcountry in a family that took books seriously. His mother belonged to a long-running Charleston book club, the kind of detail that later found its way, with teeth, into The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. Home, family stories, and the strange corners of Southern life have stayed close to his work ever since.

He came to writing through a side door.

As a teenager, he was deep into theater, then went first to Bennington College and later transferred to New York University. At NYU he studied sound engineering and philosophy, and he also fell hard for Asian cinema while haunting a Chinatown movie house. That mix, stagecraft, sound, pop culture, and obsessive movie love, helps explain why his fiction often feels so visual and tightly paced.

After college, he and his future wife, chef Amanda Cohen, lived briefly in Hong Kong and Los Angeles before settling back in Manhattan. In 2002 he helped found the New York Asian Film Festival, and for years he also worked as a journalist and film critic. That background gave him a sharp, funny nonfiction voice and an obvious affection for genre storytelling in all its unruly forms.

That movie brain never went away.

His breakout novel, Horrorstör, takes the misery of big-box retail and turns it into a haunted store nightmare. Then My Best Friend's Exorcism mixed 1980s teen friendship with demonic possession, while The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires moved into 1990s Charleston and let a group of housewives become the people who see the danger first. Readers often come for the hook, a haunted furniture store, an exorcism, a vampire next door, and stay for the characters.

He keeps finding fresh ways into familiar horror shapes. The Final Girl Support Group asks what life looks like after the slasher movie ends. How to Sell a Haunted House turns sibling tension, grief, and an old family home into a haunted house story with real emotional weight. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls moves to a Florida home for unwed mothers in 1970, where fear, friendship, and power collide.

Hendrix also writes nonfiction that shows how deep his fandom goes. Paperbacks from Hell, his lively history of the 1970s and 1980s horror paperback boom, won the Bram Stoker Award for nonfiction. With Chris Poggiali he later wrote These Fists Break Bricks, a history of how kung fu movies swept through America. He has also self-published oddball work like Satan Loves You, co-wrote the Magnolia League books with his old friend Katie Crouch, and helped make the graphic cookbook Dirt Candy with Cohen and Ryan Dunlavey.

Across all of it, certain things keep showing up. He likes ordinary people pushed into extraordinary trouble, especially women, teenagers, and outsiders who are not being taken seriously. He likes nostalgia, but never the soft-focus version. And he likes stories where the monster is real, yet the human systems around it, family pressure, bad marriages, social rules, money, shame, can be just as dangerous.

He still lives in Manhattan, still keeps one foot in horror and one in film culture, and still writes with the tone of someone who genuinely loves the strange stuff. That mix of affection, mischief, and menace is a big part of why his books feel so inviting even when they are being absolutely awful to their characters.