From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires comes a hilarious and terrifying haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting: a furniture superstore.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 … 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.
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Reading now. Totally picked this book for its cover and loving it so far! Without spoiling it, it’s both a ghost story set in a store that’s a ringer for Ikea and a pop culture send-up of corporate culture the monotony of big retail. Cleanup of the undead on aisle 9. 🙂
Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix tells a haunted house/dimensions of Hell story in a surprising way – This book looks like a glossy IKEA catalogue! Each section begins with a product description that introduces the action. Amy’s a fabulous and inspiring lead with a great character arc (including her resultant ptsd and survivor’s guilt), and I love her interactions with her co-workers and with Basil (who I thought was an underappreciated character). Grady Hendrix includes his tongue-in-cheek humor throughout even the most horrific aspects of the book, which makes this book a unique take on a beloved trope.
I greatly enjoyed this book, and quickly became a steadfast fan of author Grady Hendrix! The main character was relateable, and the characters all felt very real and authentic. This novel actually really scared me, and I couldn’t put it down. The book is modeled after an Ikea catalogue, and if you read everything, you get quite a few easter eggs in there! This novel has lots of humor and wit. 10/10 would recommend!
“It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo.”
This little piece of horror will surely amuse anyone who has step foot inside the chaos of an IKEA store. Funny, quirky, spooky…it’s an enjoyable parody. It felt a bit young for me personally, although all the characters are adults, making the resemblance to Scooby-Doo quite accurate. I’m quickly getting through the list of Grady Hendrix’s books and loving every minute. Check him out.
I picked this out because it was categorized under Humor in my library’s ebook system. While there is a bit of humor in the setting (a complete knock-off of IKEA) and the author nails the IKEA culture to a sarcastic tee, that’s about it for the humor.
That said, this is a nice little horror story. It’s quick (only about 200 pages) and fairly fast-paced, gory without being over the top, and has a nice character arc. If you’re looking for a quick horror tale that isn’t all that scary or complex, this is definitely worth a read.
The plot, scare factor in this story was basically original. I did read the entire book however it never really just “grabbed” me.
If you’ve ever worked closing for a retail job, you know how creepy it feels to lock up for the night. This book takes that feeling and ramps it up, all while keeping a darkly humorous tone.
And the chapter break ads are marvelous.
I read this in one afternoon. And that’s how I decided never to shop at IKEA ever again.
(I love you, IKEA meatballs, but we can never meet again.)
A unique and clever little horror stor(y) indeed, with a ghoulish wink to the never-ending prison of retail work and the poor zombie drones trapped within. The excellent writing and description capture everything from LOL humor to the gross and ghastly. Neat concept well-executed. You’ll never look at an IKEA or similar maze-like box store the same way again … if you even dare to enter.
Well that was interesting Let’s see what we’ve got …
Cheesy?
Feels Like a B-Rated Horror?
Creative?
Disturbing?
Creepy?
Perfectly Spooky?
I used to work overnight stocking shelves at Wal-Mart so much of this had me laughing and remembering nights I worked. There were so many times I was terrified of the dark and quiet in some spots. That experience added a lot more to this story for me.
This was a very fun and quick read. I also LOVE the layout and formatting of this book. Looks like a catalog but opens to terror. Seriously my kind of read Definitely one I say should be added to those Spooktober lists!
I really enjoyed this book. It’s a haunted house story but rather than being someone’s home, the house that is haunted is a furniture store. It’s a twist that I’m not sure I’ve heard before but which totally makes sense. After someone’s home, it is next on the list for where we spend the most time. Work does not have the same comfort of your home but knowing that you still have to go back and experience the ghosts or demons or whatever is still pretty scary.
Orsk Furniture is an Ikea rip-off and all the employees know it. The store still gets lots of business. Inside the Cleveland store, weird things are happening at night. The store manager convinces five employees to spend the night to catch whoever is playing tricks before the corporate executives arrive the next day. That night forever changes all of them.
As I mentioned above, I found the book to be solidly entertaining. It’s a new setting for an old idea which I found clever. Some of the normal activities performed in a haunted house are carried out here; I’m thinking mainly of the seance and the final reason for the haunting. Anybody in modern times knows that you don’t have a seance in a haunted building unless you want someone to die. The characters were all three dimensional and easy to picture. The final quarter of the book did seem a bit off but I can’t exactly say why. Maybe it was the ending. Maybe I was expecting something different. Honestly, I can’t quite put my finger on why so I’m hesitant to bring it up much more than that. I’m looking forward to reading more by Hendrix.
If you’re looking for a funny horror read check out Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has a satisfying ending too.
If you’re interested in Grady Hendrix, I would highly recommend starting with either The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires or My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Those titles feel the most cohesive in terms of Hendrix’s voice and style. They’re creepy, graphic, controversial, and really get under your skin, and that’s what I’ve come to expect from his books.
Horrorstör was more of a quick spook, and it didn’t quite live up to the hype I gave it based on my experience with the other titles. It’s not bad, but it’s different. Yes, the premise of a haunted Ikea instantly hooked me, but my main motivation for reading this was because I simply adore the other two books. If Horrorstör had been my first introduction to the author, I can’t say I would have necessarily felt the same pull to continue reading.
I gave it four stars (three stars on Goodreads) for two main reasons. First, the pacing was a little off. I would have liked for the spooks to have come sooner and stayed longer. Much longer in fact, considering I know what Hendrix is capable of in terms of suspense. Second, the foundation of the haunting itself needed more substance. We know too little for too long, so by the time we get that exposition it feels like it’s coming out of left field and ends up working against that all-too-essential willing suspension of disbelief.
Of course, that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book at all, which is not true! I would highly recommend it for its positives. The book design alone is hysterical, and the story follows a reliable path, hitting all the beats of an overnight-in-a-haunted-house story. It’s all very familiar but has those “Hendrix quirks” which make it truly unique.
3.5 Stars
Amy had to drop out of college because of financing and now she’s stuck working at Orsk, America’s answer to Ikea. She doesn’t fit in with the company culture and she’s only doing the minimum to get by. When Basil, her manager, asks her and Ruth Anne, a cashier, to work an overnight shift because of some disturbances that have been happening overnight, Amy says yes because she needs the extra money to pay her rent.
While Amy and Ruth Anne are doing their rounds of the store, they stumble on Matt and Trinity, two other employees who are convinced that the store is haunted. Trinity wants to film her own ghost hunter show and get her ticket out of Ohio. They’ve researched the site and found that it was built on the grounds of an old prison, where the warden believed, much like Orsk, that hard work is the cure for all ills. The night takes a terrifying turn from there and the question changes from “What’s going on?” to “Who will make it out?”
This is my third Grady Hendrix novel this year and with every single one of them, I think the premise sounds like fun and then I’m surprised by how dark the book gets. You would think I’d learn, wouldn’t you? The books do start off amusingly enough but the dread and the creep factor slowly ratchet up until I’m practically sitting on the edge of my seat, frantically flipping pages to see what happens. Horrorstör, the earliest of the books I’ve read, followed this pattern as well.
The book itself is a lot of fun, so if you decide to read it, make sure you get a physical copy instead of downloading it to your Kindle. It looks like an Ikea catalog, complete with an order form at the front, coupons at the back, and product spotlights at the beginning of each chapter. Some of the product names made me laugh, such as the “Balsak cradle.” At the beginning of the book, the product spotlights are innocuous, like the Liripip wardrobe, that clears the room and clears away your worries. As the story progresses and gets scarier, the products get darker to mirror the plot.
As with both of the other books I’ve read by this author, there’s a surprisingly serious takeaway. In this one, Amy starts to realize that she’s using her setbacks as an excuse to just walk away from everything and never even try to make her life better. She learns about loyalty and found family. She also learns that you can never judge someone until you’ve walked in their shoes.
I highly recommend this for horror readers. Don’t expect it to be as funny as it sounds and looks because it really does get scary. For a surprisingly meaningful take on a “haunted house” book, give this a try. I really enjoyed it!
Grady Hendrix is one of the bigger names in horror these days, with opinions on his writing varying wildly depending on how much of a horror puritan one is. His concepts, often toeing the line between comedy and the darker genres, sound outlandish at first glance, like Horrorstör, which as one can see from the cover, is an IKEA parody. For the uneducated, IKEA is a Swedish store famous for selling cheap but decent furniture with names like Koppla or Möjlighet that can be obscure to us dumb Americans (sorry to any international readers!), displayed in mini-home setups in a labyrinthine storehouse. I’m not sure how you would interpret this novel without knowing anything about IKEA, but its embedded in the cultural consciousness so well so Hendrix doesn’t need to do a lot of setup. Horrorstör is a traditional haunted house novel that relies on several well-done tropes, except if that haunted house was in fact a series of fake houses in a warehouse and you were stuck in there with your least favorite coworker.
Amy is a young woman working at a dead-end job at IKEA-knockoff Orsk, unable to get a promotion due to her snarky attitude at work both to customers and to her boss, Basil, who treats Orsk policy not only as law, but as holy scripture. Amy is behind on her rent, saddled with student loans from a college she never graduated from, so when Basil wants her to pull an overnight shift with him to catch whoever’s been breaking into the store at night and shitting on the sofas, she jumps at the double pay. Of course, things get more complicated when Ruth Ann, Orsk veteran, joins the shift, and they discover Matt and Trinity, two other coworkers, hooking up on one of the beds after hours. Now we have a verifiable Scooby-Doo ensemble: goody two shoes, humorless boss, hyperactive ghost enthusiast, hipster skeptic, and our deadbeat protagonist.
There’s a lot of funny imagery to be appreciated here; the book comes with this beautiful glossy cover that looks like a haunted furniture catalogue, accompanied inside by illustrations between every chapter. Each illustration is a mockery of an IKEA item, going from the ordinary couches, desks, and beds that you can find in any furniture store, slowly degrading into more horror-themed items, never losing that faux-Swedish theme. We also have a detailed map of the in-universe IKEA, a store called Orsk, delivery and shipping forms, employee feedback, and more. In a novel like Horrorstör, which relies so much on the cultural perception of IKEA, furthering that idea with more IKEA-themed items is hilarious. We all love book extras, and these may not add a huge amount to the story but they sure are fun. If you left this book on your coffee table, a guest might take a glance at the first few pages and truly think it’s a furniture catalogue.
For all my talk about the humor of this book, it’s not laugh-out-loud funny. Most of my smiles came from the general absurdity of working retail, the interactions between the great cast, and the environment. Moving away from the funnies Hendrix has littered throughout the novel and rooted in his very concept, Horrorstör remains a horror novel at heart. Whenever Hendrix is mentioned, I usually see it in the context of his novels being offbeat and humorous, but Horrorstör is terrifying story wrapped in non-serious packaging. This is not a ghost story that relies on creepiness and casual spooks, it can be visceral and gory. The descriptions of these hauntings are not only the type to send shivers down your spine, but give you full-body cringes at the twisted events happening on the page. Amy and her ragtag groups of coworkers go through hell, and I don’t mean working retail.
Although Hendrix does mean working retail. Horror has been used as a method to critique real-life horrors, from black authors facing down with racism to women turning pregnancy into body horror, and Hendrix’s thinly-veiled motive here is to point out the issues of the lower-class workforce. Working retail, or in food service, or any kind of working-class job can be absolutely brutal and mind-numbing, filing down any sort of individuality or humanity workers have in favor of creating a palatable person customers can easily bully. Moreover, like in Amy’s case, they rarely get health insurance or enough money to pay rent, no matter how many hours they slave away at. It’s a ruthless system that doesn’t care about its workers, and that the supernatural presence in this novel is deeply related to this kind of hopeless grind.
Hendrix doesn’t quite drop the ball on the ending, but it’s not as satisfying as I wanted it to be. I’m not sure exactly what conclusion I was hoping for at the end of a novel with such a bizarre concept, but with the original idea and the horror power behind the concept, I wanted something a little bit more. Regardless of this little problem, it was the book that really put Hendrix on the map for long-form horror novels, and for good reason. Horrorstör has a strong beginning and middle, and a perfectly fine ending, and clocking in at just over two hundred pages it’s the perfect read to pick up for a quick late-night spook or to recommend to a friend who really hates their job.
review blog
This is my favorite type of horror: gimmicky packaging, sarcastic MC, hilarious dialogue. I’ll read anything by Grady Hendrix.
I think overall this book was fun and creative. It didn’t promote a lot of emotional draw and was a pretty worn out idea but with a fun twist that made it stand out, as well as offer an interesting perspective on the horrors of retail if you’re willing to make a deeper connection between what’s happening and ideals about what retail can do to people. I think Hendrix is creative in his metaphors but it didn’t personally resonate with me strongly. It is much more eclectic than usual for this type of plot however. I had no real attachment to characters in this and the backstory wasn’t anything extravagant, but it was interesting. I enjoyed it and it’s a very quick read but I think while Hendrix did a wonderful job with gross out imagery, this book was meant to be more fun and different from others in the genre and less a deep rooted horror. I liked it for what it was and I think the end was decent enough but not my favorite. Overall, if you’re looking for a casual horror that won’t mess with you too much but does entertain, this is a great pick.
Oh Grady Hendrix!! I loved this book! Who knew a furniture store could be so scary? Well, it is! The characters were real & believable. The story is great and could easily be read in one sitting. The illustrations are fun. I can not wait to see what Grady Hendrix comes up with next!
Absolutely adored this book. I’ve read it more than once and will read it again. It’s so much fun. And it’s a good little haunt. I could picture everything from Ikea. I think I would have liked the haunt to be a bit more malicious. I was a little disappointed but overall I enjoyed this book, would pass it off to friends and recommend it if you want something lighthearted and fun with a bit of a scary twist.
So I thought this was a comedy zombie horror. It’s not, just a dead up. Rereading the blurb, it’s clearly not a zombie book (idk how I got that) but I did and instead it was a really really really scary book. I won’t be able to go into an Ikea for awhile…
However, my mistake does not change how I rank my reviews. I just wanted to let people know, it’s not as comical as you might think…
I thought it was a pretty original story, and quite funny as we all know how Ikea is laid out. It’s a maze, and imagine a ghosty horror happening there. It would suck. I liked the legend behind it, and thought the ending was pretty good. It made sense and I couldn’t imagine if the story took place at where it was headed in the epilogue (I won’t spoil it).
My only critique was that the characters were just typical horror movie stupid. Like, call the cops in the beginning and none of this would have happened. Also don’t build there. Just don’t. I also didn’t quite understand the cop scenario… why didn’t they show up? Was it because the place was haunted? I needed to be sorted out a little more.
I you like horror, I definitely recommend! If you wanted comedy horror, don’t do it… don’t do it…