Stainless

Justine is a vampire. Keith just lives like one. An ex-junkie and ex-rock star, his hands mangled by his dead ex’s own jealous ex, he’s let go of his ambitions. He’s content to be Justine’s live-in Renfield, helping her pick up dinner when she needs a bite, keeping an eye on her lavish L.A. manor when the sun is out and she’s down for her beauty sleep. It’s true that Justine has been around for a few centuries and Keith barely three decades, but they’re good for each other: Justine is teaching Keith to take the long view; Keith is reminding her how it feels to be alive. Yet a cohort of criminals, desperate artists, dead-enders, hangers-on, and wanna-bes, undead and otherwise, threaten their curious union. Can love stay untainted in a world of monsters? 

First published in 1996, Todd Grimson’s Stainless is a noir fantasia, a symphony of bloody horror, and a woozy, erotic tour of night-side L.A. Not only is it the greatest vampire novel of the twentieth century, it may be the final farewell to the mythic Los Angeles of Bette Davis, Dennis Hopper, and Less than Zero. In a league with the best of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler—and closing the coffin for good on poor old Bram Stoker—Stainless is the final word on fangs, hangovers, and heartbreak.

“Todd Grimson is the hippest writer in America today. Stainless [is] the first great vampire novel of the postmodern era.”

—James Ellroy

“The greatest horror writer you’ve never read . . . In Stainless, Todd Grimson set out to write ‘the Ultimate, Final Vampire Novel’—and succeeded . . . Grimson exposes the beating hearts of his characters, even the undead ones. Like its vampire characters, Stainless is a novel that grows stronger with age. We are obsessed with the vampire today because it represents the ideal of our culture . . . Stainless is a novel waiting to be rediscovered by a generation obsessed with image, even if it costs us our souls.”

—Damien Walter, The Guardian

“If Raymond Chandler or Flannery O’Connor had written a vampire novel, it might read with the brutal and passionate clarity of Stainless. Layers of corruption are explored and peeled away from the core of a heart-crushing love story. The ultimate late night in L.A.”

—Katherine Dunn

“Todd Grimson was a singular voice in American literary horror—a writer of hallucinatory brilliance and subterranean vision . . . Stainless, long out of print and newly resurrected by McNally Editions, is his overlooked masterpiece—a blood-soaked, brainy, and beautifully deranged vampire noir set in the underbelly of ’90s Los Angeles. Cool, sexy, cruel and tragically romantic, Stainless is one of the best vampire novels ever written.”

—Nick Antosca

“A vibrant, edgy love story that takes the conventions of vampire fiction and subtly transforms them until the existence of the undead seems not only plausible but profound . . . What sets Stainless apart [are] its character details, its moments of intimacy between human and vampire.”

—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“An erotic confetti-shower that leaves you thrilled and unclean.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Mr. Grimson’s Gothic slacker novel can be read on several levels: as an indictment of contemporary American values, as a tragic love story, as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of the music business, or as a remorseless vivisection of a certain social milieu that flourishes in the suburbs of Los Angeles. In other words, as a kind of satanic Less Than Zero.”

—Joe Queenan, The New York Times Book Review

“Todd Grimson’s Stainless, one of the best and more unjustly ignored vampire novels ever written, is something of a cult classic that still pops up regularly in blogs and message boards whenever a new reader gets ahold of a copy and gets blown away by its sheer intensity and its raw and bloody romanticism.”

—Oscar Palmer, Es Pop Ediciones

“With his writing teeth in the reader’s neck and his tongue in his own cheek, Grimson plunders the bloody fantasy world of vampirism.”

—Lynne Tillman

“Passages of sublime lyricism . . . Grimson demonstrates considerable skill in Stainless, and certainly has produced an intriguing alternative to the usual suspects of the vampire set.”

—Douglas E. Winter, The Washington Post

“Grimson’s description of vampire seduction has a marvelous, hallucinatory glassiness to it, and the information he provides—garlic and crucifixes don’t bother vampires, but amnesia can be a problem when you’ve lived for centuries—is a source of considerable humor.”

—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

Todd Grimson was the author of three novels and a collection of short fiction. His debut novel, Within Normal Limits, was the winner of the Oregon Book Award. His third, Brand New Cherry Flavor, was adapted into a Netflix limited series in 2021. He died in January 2025.

Stainless • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341456

Oct 7, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 45

5” x 8.5” • 256 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341609