October may have ended almost a month ago, but the month
brings with it a lot of love for spooky horror titles, whether its movies,
comics, games, or even novels. It’s that last one we discuss today as this
October, I came across what seemed to be an interesting read called Horrorstor, written by Grady Hendrix.
The way the book presented itself made it seem like it was different than a standard
horror novel and the approach lead to a good chunk of people picking it up. It marketed
itself as a horror-comedy and with the book styled to look like an IKEA
furniture catalog, it seemed quirky on the surface.
So, is the book’s story just as interesting as its
packaging?
Let’s look at Horrorstor.
STORY
The story takes place in Cleveland, Ohio at ORSK, an
IKEA-styled furniture superstore. Strange occurances have been happening there
and management wants to know what’s going on. Store manager Basil decides to stay
overnight with two other employees, devoted, dedicated Ruth Anne and
disgruntled, young, and restless Amy, to see if they can find out what’s going
on. As their patrol goes further into the night, they find out that the problem
isn’t a vandal or thieves sneaking into the store; the store is haunted.
While the set-up looks mostly like a standard haunted
location story, it does take some psychological angles, which we particularly
see with Amy, our protagonist for the story. The villain (who will remain
nameless due to spoilers) tries to get into the characters’ heads and really
does so with some of them, so much so that it has some lasting effects on some
of the characters. Apart from that though, this does seem to carry a lot in
common with other haunting stories with not much to set it apart besides the
setting. Also, for a “horror-comedy”, there weren’t that many funny moments in
the story. Apart from some elements with the book’s presentation (more on that
below) and a couple of characters (also below), the story mostly seems to take
itself seriously, which is fine on its own, but the term “horror-comedy” comes
with some expectations.
CHARACTERS
As mentioned before, Amy is our protagonist here. She thinks
that her work as a Team Member at ORSK is a dead-end job, she has a lot of
issues with money, and while she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her
life, she knows she doesn’t want to spend it there. She seems like an okay
character with room to grow over the course of the story, but she doesn’t seem
that interesting until the very end of the story. Less could be said about
Basil and Ruth Anne who mostly fill roles to contrast Amy, with Basil as the boss
who takes his job way too seriously and Ruth Anne as the dedicated worker who
can’t even think of working anywhere else. Again, there isn’t much variation
from this until the very end.
A couple of side characters who appear throughout the story are
two other ORSK employees, Matt and Trinity, who heard some local legends about
ghosts that might be haunting the store’s location and sneak in, without Basil’s
knowledge, to try to capture some camera footage in a bid to be reality TV
ghost hunters. These two have the most character variation of anyone else in
the book. Along with their reason for being there, Trinity’s quirky personality
contrasting against Matt as the level-headed, rational person added some more
color to the scenes they were in.
VISUALS
In most cases, a novel wouldn’t offer much in the way of
visuals, but Horrorstor seems to be an exception. The book is designed to look
like a spooky, twisted version of an IKEA catalog, glossy cover and all. The
first few pages, before the story starts, try to sell the catalog theme with
some customer service ads and a fake order form for ORSK furniture. The beginning
of each chapter includes an ad for a different furniture item featured in the
story. They start out normally, but as the story progresses, the furniture gets
swapped out with more sinister looking items, though keeping the descriptions
as if the store would have been selling these items. It gets a few laughs seeing
an ad describing a torture device as coming in a small range of different
colors. The end of the book includes a few more catalog-styled ads, but by the
time readers reach the end of the story, they have a whole different vibe to
them.
The catalog presentation is not only funny and quirky, it
even aids the story presentation in some ways. It starts off by setting in your
mind that this is just a normal furniture store, but then the presentation
changes with the story to show that this store is far from normal.
FINAL VERDICT
Horrorstor is a good chiller of a story, but not a great
one. Aside from the furniture store setting, it follows a lot of the tropes of
haunted location stories. The presentation of the book itself though is
interesting and worth a browse just to see how things warp and change. It’s not
a bad story, but others have done better.
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