Book Review: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

Title: Horrorstör

Author: Grady Hendrix

Publisher: Quirk Books

Pages: 240

Format: E-book

Published: September, 2014

Price: $9.84 -> Rp119.237 (Amazon)

Rating: 4 / 5 stars

Date started: June 15, 2016 - Date finished: June 17, 2016

Synopsis:

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring wardrobes, shattered Brooka glassware, and vandalized Liripip sofa beds - clearly someone, or something, is up to no good. To unravel the mystery, five young employees volunteer for a long dusk-till-dawn shift and encounter horrors that defy imagination. Along the way, author Grady Hendrix infuses sly social commentary on the nature of work in the new twenty-first-century economy.

A traditional haunted house story in a contemporary setting, and full of current fears, Horrorstör delivers a high-concept premise in a unique style.

Review:

In Cuyahoga, Ohio there is a store called Orsk. It is one of the many Orsk branch in America. Orsk is basically a furniture and home supplies store just like IKEA but the difference is IKEA is from Sweden and Orsk is 100% American, other parts are more or less the same. So, think of Orsk as an American IKEA. In Horrorstör, we follow our main character Amy, who is an employee at Orsk who is just recently transferred to the Cuyahoga branch of Orsk and she hates it there, all she wants is just to transfer to another branch of Orsk.

One day, Amy was called into the manager's office with a fellow colleague Ruth Anne. She thought she was going to get fired because the manager, Basil found out about her transfer request and did not approve of it, but fortunately she did not get fired instead Basil asked both Ruth Anne and Amy to do an overtime watching the store alongside him because recently the there have been disturbances in Orsk, which resulted in some broken furnitures and someone leaving a literal shit in one of the display sofas. Basil suspected that these vandalism occur after the store is closed, when all of the store lights are dimmed. Basil asked Amy and Ruth Anne to stay the night with him in the store because the next day someone from regional is going to come and check it out. Both Ruth Anne and Amy agreed. Ruth Anne agreed more voluntarily. Meanwhile Amy just needed the money to cover her rent.

During the night they stayed in Orsk to watch over the store. Turns out they weren't they only ones there, and when they expected to face some random criminal turns out to be something else entirely.

The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane.

I really had fun reading this book. I'll admit at first I thought this was going to be a horror-comedy type of book guessing from the cover but it actually isn't, this book is a full on horror-thriller book and it was done quite nicely I might add. Reading this book from beginning to the end was like taking a tour of Orsk. In my mind I can imagine the scenes quite clearly because I actually thought of IKEA when I read this book, and having been to IKEA before it helped so much with the reading experience.

The horror scene happened inside the store, so the reader is taken into every aspect of Orsk in this book from the storage, employee's break room, the showcase floor, etc. The author's writing was really descriptive but not in a way that's too descriptive but just enough for us to imagine the scenes clearly and I love the fact that throughout the book we are introduced to the many types of Orsk's products and they were just seamlessly embedded in the story. Although, this is also one of the ironic parts about this book because for a store that claims to be 100% American the names of the products are awfully a lot similar to IKEA, the names are kind of Swedish, which I find funny.

For her, the world was divided into two kinds of jobs: those where you had to stand up, and those where you could sit down. If you were standing up, you were paid hourly. If you were sitting down, you were salaried.

Other things that are nice about this book is the chapter beginnings or chapter titles. The chapter titles in this book are all descriptions of Orsk products. Sometimes we also get some additional materials like employee scorecards, flyers of Orsk and even coupons. Kind of cool right? So it's like we are reading a novel in the format of a catalogue, which is exactly what it's supposed to feel when you read the physical form of this book I assume (I don't know much since I read the e-book version on my kindle).

The horror scenes were good. Not all of them are like super scary but some scenes did give me chills. In some ways the horror scenes were gory and bloody and I kind of like that. The kind of horrors I prefer is either bloody or bat shit scary. Almost forgot, for a horror book this has a character development aspect in it, which I always appreciate.

I haven't read a lot of horror books but I would definitely recommend this one. It was fun and scary at the same time. Now, whenever I go to IKEA in Alam Sutera I'm going to remember this book.

That's all for now!