Book 7 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Getting closer to catching up.

Okay, so this is one of those books that I’ve meant to read for years and never quite got around to! I came close about a year ago, when I finally broke down and bought a copy… however, I left it on the floor next to the couch and a cat managed to puke on it. I only got around to getting a new copy a couple of months ago, and have finally read it.

The book in question is Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix.

As is clear from the title and the image, Horrorstör is a haunted house story set in what amounts to an Ikea! It is a quite entertaining story, though I wouldn’t exactly refer to it as “horror comedy” as it is referred to on Wikipedia.

So I haven’t really read anything else by Grady Hendrix, with the exception of his excellent visual history of 80s horror paperbacks, Paperbacks from Hell. Though I hadn’t read any of his fiction before, I was well aware of it — his books are a common feature of the horror section of bookstores, with quirky and catchy titles like My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) and The Final Girl Support Group (2021). Horrorstör was his first breakout novel, and one can see why: it is both a fun story and a visual treat, with images and fake advertisements for the fictional store it is set in.

The story of Horrorstör is quite straightforward: strange things have been happening at night at a branch of the Ikea-ripoff furniture store chain ORSK, which like Ikea has a wandering, maze-like showroom and products with unpronounceable Swedish names. While the store is empty, products are being damaged, and often soiled, with some regularity, and it has become a significant concern to management. Store manager Basil enlists employees Amy and Ruth Anne to spend the night at the store and find the source of the problem. They soon find that other people have decided to sneak into the establishment that night for their own purposes, but they are not the real problem. The real problem is that something buried at the site of the store has awakened after a long slumber, and it sees the overnight employees as new subjects for its monstrous plans.

The book is quite short and fast-paced, and it leans heavily into its “haunted Ikea” concept. Every chapter begins with an illustrated advertisement for an ORSK product, and these advertisements eventually tell a story of their own — keep an eye on how they change as the book progresses! The beginning of the book includes additional ORSK related images like employee evaluations and a store map. By the end of the book, things have changed dramatically, and the end pages include more images that reflect those changes. (With that in mind, don’t peek at the last few pages, which can be spoilery! There is also what amounts to a great “stinger” to the tale that implies even more horror to come.)

The central focus of the novel is Amy, who is young and disillusioned with her job at ORSK and doesn’t care at all about her responsibilities, and only agrees to spend the night at the store in order to earn a transfer somewhere else. As the night progresses, however, she will be forced to decide what sort of person she wants to be.

As I’ve said, though the book is regarded as horror comedy by many reviewers, I find it is really straight horror, with a very quirky concept. Don’t expect anything to be particularly light-hearted here: horrible things happen, and characters meet awful ends. The fact that it happens in an Ikea-like grants it a level of absurdity, but it never really breaks into comedy like an Evil Dead II or Return of the Living Dead. With that said, however, it also is not a truly dark and nasty horror novel, either, and can be enjoyed by a wide variety of readers. I think that is part of Hendrix’s strength: generating genuine horror stories with a mass appeal.

Overall, Horrorstör is a fun, fast-paced horror novel, and unusual enough to be worth picking up. I’m looking forward to tackling more of Hendrix’s work in the future.

PS Hendrix was careful in the book to make it clear that ORSK is an Ikea ripoff, which probably allowed him to avoid any legal repercussions from Ikea itself. An upcoming horror game The Store is Closed was not so lucky a few years ago, when Ikea sent the designer a cease-and-desist letter to make the game less like Ikea. (The game is still in development, I should note, and I am looking forward to it.)