Review: Horrorstör
My rating: [rating=3]
Summary:
Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Columbus, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring wardrobes, shattered Brooka glassware, and vandalized Liripip sofa beds clearly, someone or something is up to no good.
To unravel the mystery, five young employees volunteer for a long dusk-till-dawn shift—and they encounter horrors that defy imagination. Along the way, author Grady Hendrix infuses sly social commentary on the nature of work in the new twenty-firstcentury economy.
A traditional haunted house story in a contemporary setting (and full of current fears), Horrorstör comes conveniently packaged in the form of a retail catalog, complete with illustrations of ready-to-assemble furniture and other, more sinister accessories. We promise you’ve never seen anything quite like it!
Review:
(I got an ARC through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.)
3.5 stars. An interesting enough blend, in my opinion, of an IKEA/retail parody coupled with horror/ghost stories elements, though after a while, I wished said blend had been more balanced (hence my rating: I would have liked this book more if it had been the case, I think).
It plays on several tropes typical of the genre (people isolated in a haunted place, with dangerous things happening as soon as they’re separated, etc.), while also offering tongue-in-cheek criticism of large retail stores practices. One thing I really liked, both as a reader and as a graphic-designer, was that the book itself reads like an IKEA catalogue, complete with square format, furniture illustrations, pseudo-Swedish names. Those schemas also gradually shift from innocent-looking retail items to contraptions and devices that appear in the real horror part, and the change was subtle enough to make me at unease without realising, for a few seconds, what was actually wrong.
The characters weren’t too likeable in the beginning, in a cardboard-cut way, but some of them I started to appreciate after a while, and they displayed growth as well: nobody could get out unchanged from such an experience, after all, and the changes seemed to me both traumatising as well as positive.
Oddly enough, or maybe not, the serious horror part didn’t really cut it for me. It was definitely creepy, with vivid descriptions, and definitely fit what I’d expected from a horror story. In fact, I’m of a mind to dub it “Silent Hill meets IKEA”, in that the places the characters are trapped in aren’t merely frightening: they also toy with their psyches. However, I realised I missed the funnier tone from earlier chapters. The book cover made me expect more satire, and so, in the end, I felt a little disappointed in that regard.
Nevertheless, I’d recommend this story. It was entertaining, had its really scary parts, and its ending provides a conclusion to the night’s events while still leaving room for enough speculation—not a cliffhanger, but reader’s imagination, which is something I always appreciate.