Horrorstör

I love a classic haunted house as much as anyone. Theres something wonderful about an old abandoned house (or mansion or castle or hotel or insane asylum), dilapidated, decaying, overgrown, crumbling, filled with creaking doors, dark shadows, creepy dolls, and something sinister that whispers from the attic.

But theres also a place in my heart for a modern, clean, brightly-lit building thats nevertheless crawling with the unquiet spirits of the dead. The suburban home built over an Indian graveyard, the supermarket with bloody handprints appearing mysteriously on the freezer cases, the trendy nightclub plagued by unusual deaths and fashionable vampires. Horror writers love this stuff, too you can find horror wrapped around modern suburban and retail settings in films like Poltergeist and Dawn of the Dead (and many other early-outbreak zombie movies) and in books and stories like Stephen Kings The Mist, Anne Rivers Siddons The House Next Door, and Mark Z. Danielewskis House of Leaves.

And theres also this book, Horrorstr, a short horror novel (with strong humor elements) written by Grady Hendrix. Its focus is on a haunting at an IKEA-style big box retail store.

The lead character in the story is Amy, a slacker in a thoroughly dead-end job working retail at ORSK, a furniture and housewares store designed from the ground up to look and feel like an IKEA store. It has the same winding pathway through the store, the same Magic Tool required to put every piece of furniture together, the same style of faux-Scandinavian names for all the products. Amy wants to transfer back to the ORSK store she used to work at, mainly because she thinks shes about to get fired by Basil, an assistant manager and gung-ho ORSK fanboy. But as it turns out, Basil actually wants to ask Amy and another co-worker, Ruth Anne, an older long-term employee who lives for her job, loves stuffed animals, and is adored by everyone on the staff, to take on a special duty patrolling the store at night.

You see, the store has been suffering unusual vandalism. Some of the glassware has been broken, furniture has been soiled, and there are odd smells in the building. Basil wants Amy and Ruth Anne to join him on a secret late-night patrol, after everyone has gone home, to see if anyone is breaking into the building. They soon find some interesting problems. There are rats in the kitchen showcases, even though theres no food there and no water hookups. Everyone keeps getting lost, which might make sense if they were just customers and not employees trained to find their way around the store quickly. And the mysterious grafitti messages in the restrooms referring ominously to the Beehive are multiplying rapidly.

And they do find some unexpected interlopers. Matt and Trinity are a couple of fellow co-workers at ORSK who have sneaked into the store because they thinks there are ghosts in the building and want to make a reality-TV ghost hunter show. And theres also a homeless man, Carl, who has been secretly living in the store for a few weeks.

Trinity has an idea. She still thinks there are ghosts in the building, and whats the best way to contact ghosts? Lets everyone hold a seance!

And then everything goes straight to hell.

Can Amy and her coworkers survive the night shift at ORSK? Can they escape the store? Or are they doomed to toil forever in the stone walls and iron restraints of the Beehive?

I really enjoyed this book. I burned my way through it as quickly as I could, and a couple nights, where I made the mistake of reading it too close to bedtime, it actually kept me up late. I did think that the very best parts of the novel were fairly early on, when the scares were subtle and more creepy than heart-stopping. The seasoned employees getting lost in their own store? That was weirdly realistic you could imagine it happening, but you could also see why it would be really unnerving. The odd sounds after the store closes, combined with the sudden unfamiliarity of the environment of the store was also spooky and definitely familiar for anyone whos ever had to work late in their office, where darkness and emptiness make the comfortable surroundings feel strange and dangerous.

Even better than that was the graffiti in the restroom. The dozens of scrawled names and scratched-out years, all referencing the mysterious Beehive, feel intensely eerie, a perfect element to place in a modern retail ghost story. There are also some very effective moments when the employees discover that the purely decorative doors in the showcases now open into dank, cavernous hallways leading deep into the earth.

And the seance may have been a monumentally stupid move on the part of the characters, but the way they did it was an original and wonderful thing to have in a horror novel. Its simultaneously terrifying because you know whats going to happen and hilarious because youknowwhats going to happen.

Once the Big Bad makes his appearance, and especially when he captures Amy for the first time, the story starts moving away from being a ghost story and edging more into torture porn. The story shows some serious cracks in this section, in part because its too long I just dont enjoy reading multiple pages about someone being strapped into a torture chair that tightens to the point where she loses sensation in her limbs and can barely draw a breath. (This may also indicate that I have never enjoyed torture porn.) But its also a bit too short were told that Amys mind breaks almost entirely not long after shes strapped in, to the point where Stockholm Syndrome sets in and she starts worshiping her captor. And then, when shes released from confinement, its not too many more pages before her mind has completely recovered to its previously healthy state and even improved, as shes much braver and more resourceful for the rest of the novel.

One of the real selling points of this novel is the fantastic graphic design by Andie Reid and illustrations by Michael Rogalski. The book cover looks like one of the big, glossy IKEA design catalogs with a few subtle and not-so-subtle differences to give some visual cues to the horrors within and each chapter opens with a page from the fictional ORSK catalog spotlighting one of their products, complete with IKEA-style art, a faux-Scandinavian name, and upbeat flavor text. But after the supernatural terrors start climbing out of the woodwork after the seance, all the featured furniture gets replaced with medieval torture devices. It makes the story a lot more fun and a lot funnier, while still giving a nice dose of the chills to readers.

Weird things are happening at the Cuyahoga Orsk store. Things break during the night. Employees – sorry, “partners” – are receiving texts on their cell phones saying, simply, “Help”. The employee entrance is jammed. The escalator up to the showroom is running backwards. And last night, someone got what sure smells like poop all over a Brooka couch.

(Orsk is explicitly not IKEA. It is explicitly a “me-too” store whose business model is based on IKEA, right down to the absolutely-necessary-and-easily-lost tool.)

So dissatisfied employee Amy, very satisfied employee Ruth Anne, and their manager Basil agree, for their various reasons, to say in the store overnight and see what is going on. Even without the giveaway title, anyone with any plot savvy is thinking _This can’t end well_.

And, of course, it doesn’t. First mysterious graffiti appears in the employee women’s room. then Matt – another partner who isn’t supposed to be there but is, as is Trinity, because they want to be famous ghost hunters – says the store is built on the site of an old prison.

It’s mostly a good read. I say “mostly” because it verges a little too close to torture-porn for my tastes a couple of times. It’s also a very quick read; I got through its 243 pages in an afternoon.

The formatting of the book is clever. The whole thing, other than the text, is laid out like an Orsk catalog, with diagrams of various products preceding each chapter. Needless to say, after the scary stuff starts, the diagrams get weird too. So props to illustrator Michael Rogalski and designer Andie Reid – and, hey, to cover photographer Christine Ferrara, who sets the mood quite nicely.

Someone had to have worked in retail hell to know the buzzwords, slogans, dogma and soul-sucking after effects of dealing with the General public. They had it down cold. When you make that a metaphor for good old fashioned evil, well, that’s always interesting.

Just as in that old movie, where the house is built on the Indian burial ground and bad things start to happen when the little girl looks at static on TV, Orsk, a knock off of IKEA, is built on top of an evil site that mirrors how Orsk runs their business but there is spiritual madness under the floorboards of Orsk.

Bad things start to happen, and of course they get worse. The tale cleverly intersperses IKEA-like product descriptions between chapters that are used in the upcoming chapter. As the tale gets darker, so too the products.

I have to say my favorite part of the story was the epilogue. Maybe a sequel will address the overwhelming fascination between Orsk and evil in a global scale. I would buy that book. As for this one, it was clever, it was light, it was quick and it was quirky. I liked it.

I saw this book in my local Foyles about a year and a half ago. The thing that drew me to this book was that:

It was square, which is quite unusual for a book
It looked like it was set in IKEA
It had pictures
I didn’t actually buy the book until a year later, and then it took me another six months to get around to reading it.

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.

To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, theyll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.

This book may be one of the strangest things that I have ever read. I am obsessed with IKEA. That makes me sound like a weirdo, let me re-phrase: as I get older, the more enjoyable the experience of IKEA becomes, so when reading a book about an alternate version of the furniture store, I was all here for it.

To start off, we are guided around the store of Orsk by one of the associates, a witty, sarcastic young woman. Throughout the beginning of the book, we learn that weird things have been happening in Orsk that no one can explain. The boss of the store asks three associates to do a night shift and find out what is going on – and it’s waaaayyweirder than I expected! There’s possession, ghosts, and things that I don’t even think have a name yet. There were these weird beings that were like ghosts but weren’t? I don’t even know… The mind of Grady Hendrix must be a peculiar one.

They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed shed be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks.

Grady Hendrix, Horrorstr

Accompanying us along the journey through the maze of Orsk are pictures, documents, associate files, and (sarcastic) information about the products that describe how dangerous and gruesome they can be.

If there is one film that I would adapt to a movie, it would be this one. It has so much potential to be this amazing horror film with a slight dark humorous twist. I feel like it needs to happen and I bet that it would be a huge success!

The book was gripping, tense and scary. The weird thing about this book is that the storyline itself isn’t that great. It’s quite a flimsy plot but it’s just so well written that you don’t notice whilst reading. It was only on reflection that I realised that the plot was weak.

BUT THE ENDING?!! I MEAN, COME ON! WHERE IS THE SEQUEL? And if we don’t get a sequel, can we at least get a novella? PLEASE?!

Overall, this was a really good book and I absolutely devoured it. It took me three hours to read it and I didn’t move off of my sofa until I had finished it. I just couldn’t put it down, it gripped me. I thoroughly recommend this book if you’re looking for a strange horror read that is unique in its format and plot.

Very different from what I normally read. I think this is the first “horror” esque book I have ever read!

The book itself is so unique and interesting, set out like an Ikea catalogue, we follow our main character Amy who works for this worlds version of Ikea (Orsk). One night on a night shift Amy starts to notice weird happenings in the store, paranormal things. The book spans one night in a store which is haunted by ghosts.

This is a parody story, so while I was a little freaked out by some descriptions it wasn’t exactly “scary” and that’s coming from someone who scares easily. However, be warned there are vivid descriptions of gore.

The thing that really sells this for me though, is the layout. I think if this story had a completely different format and cover design, I would not have looked twice, let alone purchased.

Definitely, an interesting read, not one I would read again but I’m glad I gave it a go. Ikea will never be the same for me after this book!

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