The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: Horrorstör
AUTHOR: Grady Hendrix
@grady_hendrix
Publisher: Quirk Books @quirkbooks
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: July 21st 2020
The Review
So, fresh on the heels of Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Laney and I immediately looked for more from Grady Hendrix. He had a great way of taking an old horror story and crafting it into something fresh that spoke to the modern day. Lo and behold, Horrorstör. We saw the cover, and who was narrating the audiobook, and we were immediately hooked. For more than one reason for me.
A long time back, I had a video game concept. It was where you were surviving the night in a haunted IKEA, where you were plagued by horrific hallucinations and monsters that wanted you dead, all based on the theme of the rooms you were in. Well, now I can officially put that idea to rest, because Horrorstör satisfied the niche. And, it did so with such a great sense of humor that I found myself laughing as much as cringing from the crawlies.
The story focuses on a ripoff IKEA, which is acknowledged to be such in the story. It’s dealing with mysterious, impossible vandalisms, and the employees keep getting text messages saying “HELP” from an unknown number. So, the floor manager gets two employees who can’t turn him down to join him for an overnight shift to figure out what’s going on.
It’s haunted. Things go very bad.
This book talks about much more than just ghosts and allen wrenches. It talks about the life of people stuck in retail jobs with no visible way out. It talks about looking at the person next to you in your work and seeing who they are outside of the job. It’s about how big box retail engineers its stores to manipulate your mind into what they want. It’s also about not letting the ditzy ghost-hunter wannabe do a seance in the obviously haunted big box store, but that should be a given. Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, seances are a bad idea.
The audiobook is narrated primarily by Tai Simmons, but each chapter has an ad for the ripoff IKEA read by Bronson Pinchot. That’s Balki Bartokomous from Perfect Strangers, y’all. His segments are legitimately funny.
In summary: If you like ghosty stories, you’ll love this book. If you work at IKEA, you’ll hate this book… Or die laughing. One of the two.
You can see more in my video review:
Summary:
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, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.
A traditional haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, Horrorstör comes packaged in the form of a glossy mail order catalog, complete with product illustrations, a home delivery order form, and a map of Orsk’s labyrinthine showroom.
*****
I voluntarily listened to a narration of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Ghosts definitely didn’t make me do it.