Horrorstör
Besides keeping me awake late into the night the comedy-horror novel, Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix made me laugh out loud at the best integration of graphic design with narrative ever done in horror paperback. There is a lot to love, most especially that the novel is a masterclass in the use of setting.
The book feels and looks like an Ikea catalog. Before readers crack the cover they are primed for the setting. The novel drops you into an Ikea-esque store and Hendrix immediately begins drawing out the colors, sights, sounds, textures, and verbiage of that well-known environment to build his imagined world, Orsk.
Real-life Ikea environments are deliberately designed to give a clean, controlled customer experience. If you’ve been to Ikea you know the pristine cool grey of the bathrooms. Hendrix slashes that preconception with unhinged graffiti and the story begins. The fear grows by taking that seed, already planted in the reader, and cutting across it with everything it is not: filth, destruction, darkness, and confusion. As the saying goes, ‘Take what is known, and upend it.’ Just imaging being in Ikea when the lights cut out can give me nightmares. With a setting like that, that storytellers work is half-way done.
Buy the book at Amazon or Indiebound. Check out his website for other great reads including NYT bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires which is on our TBR list.
“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.”
