I picked up Grady Hendrix’s 2014[1]I didn’t realize it was over a decade old till I was about ¾ done reading it. novel Horrorstör because I’m a sucker for a high concept. The cover—as shown above—looks an awful lot like an IKEA catalog cover, showing how you might stage a room with IKEA furniture. Then you look a little closer and see that there’s something… off… about the photos on the wall.
So it is with the book. It’s set in an Orsk store, which is, as the text of the novel itself points out, a blatant American rip-off of IKEA. The store’s floorplan, much like IKEA, is set up to funnel consumers along a path optimized to make them buy things. Orsk calls this “the Bright and Shining Path”, and it’s as mercenary, as mercantile, and as creepy as it sounds.
This particular Orsk store has some issues: minor thefts, overnight breakage, a suspicion that someone’s been somehow managing to sneak in overnight. One of the middle managers takes it upon himself to try to solve the problem, gathering a small team to spend a night in the store and do a sweep of the place every hour or so.
This being a horror novel, of course, things go very sideways.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel. It starts out as a workplace comedy (of errors, of manners, of conflicts), like a more-cynical Superstore or maybe a less-cynical The Office, and then, at a certain point, it veers sharply and irrevocably into horror. I can take a certain amount of horror, and Hendrix skates right up to that line, peeking over into darker territory than I’m comfortable with. (I knew going in that this was probably how it was going to go, having previously read his novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires[2]He’s got a way with titles; I have yet to read My Best Friend’s Exorcism but that title calls to me., which likewise starts out as a grim comedy of disaffected housewives and then goes dark.) I’d say that Hendrix’s horror has a lot in common with, say, that of Stephen King; if you can handle the grimness and the gore of King, you’ll make it through a Hendrix novel too. (Not unchanged, but shouldn’t every novel change you?)
Also like King, Hendrix’s real talent is in his character work. I didn’t know anything about Amy, or Basil, or Ruth Anne, Matt, Trinity, or anyone else in Horrorstör before I started reading it[3]I mean, really, how could I?, but by the end I wanted nothing but the best for them. (Well, most of them. [REDACTED] can get bent.) He also didn’t skimp on the aftermath: these people went through a lot, and the survivors are marked forever. There’s genuine psychic scarring on display in the epilög[4]Yes., along with physical scarring, and the character development doesn’t end till the end of the last sentence.
Should you read Horrorstör? Yes, if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a haunted house in an IKEA[5]Or reasonable hand-drawn facsimile.. Read it if you can take it. Read it if you dare.