NB: Welcome to Flashback Friday! During FBF, we’ll be resurrecting older posts and reviews that are relevant to things we’ve published on the site this week. Elyse reviewed a pretty creepy horror/thriller, so we thought we’d resurrect a lighter horror novel for other readers. This review was originally published (weirdly a year ago today) August 26, 2015.
Horrorstör is basically a novel about a haunted IKEA. There’s no romance in it, but it’s relevant to the interests of the Bitchery in the sense that it’s about a haunted IKEA, a concept that should strike mingled dread and delight in the soul of anyone who has ever actually been to IKEA.
In the novel, an American company decides to compete with IKEA by offering vaguely Scandinavian-style furniture in the same store model as IKEA, except for less money. This company is called Orsk, and on a very, very bad night a few of its employees try to find out what happens in the Orsk showroom after hours. Amy, our heroine, is bribed into the overnight shift by her irritating boss, Basil. He also persuades employee Ruth Anne to do it because she’s too nice to say no. Mike and Trinity are there because they want to record a ghost and be on TV. Luckily they are in a nice, safe Ikea Orsk so nothing can go wrong, right? Wrong.
Before I get into the nitty gritty, here are three things that I adored about the book instantly:
- The concept of a haunted IKEA.
- The word “Orsk”. Say it out loud: Orsk. It’s funny, right? My apologies to people who live in Orsk, Russia. I’m sure that to a Russian speaker the name is not funny, and having googled “Orsk” it looks like a lovely (and cold) place. But to my American ears the word is the perfect stand in for IKEA – a word clearly selected at random by marketing officials who didn’t think this through. Did they know that Orsk is the name of an actual town in Russia? Did they care?
- The cover. The whole design of the book is phenomenal, and I’ll talk about that in more detail, but even if the creativity had been limited to the cover I would have given this book some love. The front is pictured above – here’s the back:
When it comes to horror I’m a lightweight. I thought this book was scary, but I think a lot of innocuous things are scary. Just because this book made me have a nightmare about a haunted store doesn’t mean you will find it scary at all. The more over the top, gross, Grand Guignol moments are more horrifying than scary, because they are so far removed from our regular experience. But as someone who finds IKEA to be totally disorienting in real life, the early scenes in which Amy and Ruth Anne get lost in the showroom were incredibly spooky.
Fellow reviewer Amanda also liked the book, but she didn’t find it particularly scary: “It’s a little gross but it’s got a nice blend of horror and humor, which is usually how I prefer it.”
The tone starts off funny, and as the story progresses it turns creepy and escalates to, “Holy crap what just happened!” The tone is reflected by the layout of the book, which resembles an IKEA catalog, and which opens each chapter with a new advertisement. Initially the ads are for innocuous, even cheerful pieces of furniture, but the captions become more and more ominous and the furniture weirder and weirder.
Initially I was put off by the writing style, but then I realized that the whole book is written in IKEA language – short words, short sentences, to the point.
Even in the darkest moments, the absurdity of the situation adds some sardonic humor. It’s hard not to giggle at a line like “They nailed me inside a Liripip” or a scenario in which someone’s survival depends on disassembling cheap furniture with one of those weird Allen wrench things (Orsk calls them “magic tools” and luckily everyone who works there carries a bunch in their pockets, though usually that’s so that they can put stuff together, not take stuff apart).
The main appeal to the book is the concept, not the characters, but I loved Basil, the manager whose character development I won’t spoil, and the heroine, Amy, who starts off being pretty immature and shows her inner grit and compassion as the story develops. Ruth Anne is a great person with hidden depths.
For a book which is mainly an excuse to figure out what would happen if you were shrink wrapped to an office chair (bad, bad things, that’s what would happen) most of the characters get at least a little development and Basil and Amy get a ton. Their development is believable and deeply satisfying (but not romantic).
Spoiler about the tone of the ending:
The hot rumor is that this book is being made into a TV series. I won’t be watching it because watching scary things makes me pee my pants, but I’m having fun casting it in my head. Meanwhile, this is a fun book to read for Halloween, during a move or a remodel or any other IKEA-themed occasion, or any time you want a book with a female character who develops in a plausible and exciting way, some snarky satire about consumerism, and a lot of very weird, rather gross imagery. And if, like me, you think IKEAs are inherently creepy, then as soon as the first fake door in the book opens into a world of pain you’ll have the deep satisfaction of yelling, “I KNEW IT!”
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I LOVED this book. I found it creepy, but I am unable to enter an IKEA (or any kind of department store) without getting lost, so I guess I’m kind of the target audience here. People with a sense of direction could probably shrug it off, but it worked for me a little too well.
Am I the only one who WISHED Basil and Amy had some romantic development? Because by the end I adored Basil, no lie.
I was lucky enough to win an ARC of this and, while I didn’t find it scary*, I did enjoy it. Definitely creepy.
*I don’t remember ever finding a book actually scary.
Yay Horrorstor! It did creep me out, especially the last few chapters, but admittedly: 1) I am a scaredy cat, and 2) I read it all one night I was alone in an airport because I had a flight at dawn, and let me tell you, the author nailed the feeling of “wrongness” when there’s nobody around in places designed to be full of people.
Exciting news about the tv series, though I could never watch it either, I did think it’d have great potential to be adapted for the screen.
Matt! Not Mike! (Mike is Matt’s code name on Daredevil, and if you are also obsessed with Daredevil as I am the confusion is understandable!)
I enjoyed this too, and I’m a horror lightweight. I thought it was really funny, and admired the design. (I definitely would not want to read this digitally. The experience of holding a hauntedIKEA catalog is delightful.) My husband and teenager also liked it, and my 10-year-old has been steadily chanting “We never stop. We never sleep. And now we’re in your home.” to try to scare her sister.
The show was optioned by Fox and Gail Berman, who used to head the production company that developed Buffy and Angel. So, fingers crossed.
Heh! I remember seeing getting this plugged on tor.com when it first came out, and I grinned at the concept at the time–but never actually committed to reading it. I think perhaps I should now change my mind!
I thought this was a great book. Funny, and unexpectedly really, really scary! The author has a great knack for scary imagery. I did think the ending was fairly weak. It felt like it just sort of… dribbled off and non-resolved because it couldn’t think of what else to do. I liked the heroine’s final actions for what they meant for her, but I didn’t feel like the plot was resolved satisfactorily. I liked that the heroine started realizing she couldn’t blame everyone else for her problems and inaction, and that she was judging (most of) her coworkers really unfairly. I think this book fumbled its story in the end, but it was still massively entertaining… I stayed up til 2 to finish it, and some of the imagery stayed with me. This is also to turn into a TV show soon, FYI!
Can anyone tell me if this has a lot of pictures? I would be reading it on an e-ink Kindle and if there are pictures they don’t turn out well.
Hey Kim! Each chapter has a little fake diagram of a fake product the store sells, and at the start and end of the book there’s a bunch of “promotional material” from the store aimed at employees and such that I believe are also handled with pictures. While some of this is used in subtle world building, you also won’t miss out on the story if you just skip them. If you can download a sample, that might help you decide. 🙂
Thanks Leah!
I found “Gerald’s Game” genuinely scary. It sounds like this one would hit the gross-out/pleasantly creepy/funny marks for me. The cover design is just genius.
Just as an aside, remember that little monkey who was found in a sheepskin coat in Ikea a few years back? I think of him often…
Scandinavian here, and a little obsessed with the concept of Scandinavia seen from abroad, and with talking about my own language. So I thought I could mention that “Orsk”, while being a city in Russia, is also one letter away from “Norsk”, which is the Norwegian word for, well, Norwegian.
The other thing is the use of ö over the letter o, which I assume is used to signify that something is Swedish? (In Norway we write the same letter as ø?) I’m always curious about how people who don’t use that letter will read it inside their head. But in this title it gets a double meaning… because “stör” is a Swedish word, which means disturbed, and I’m kind of hoping that the use of the word was intentional.
Writing this from my IKEA couch, looking up at my IKEA bookshelf with IKEA lamps attached to it. Will go on looking for books to read now.
So I just finished this book….. and now I can never go back to Ikea ever again. (Which is a shame because I kinda like that store). I also contemplated getting rid of all my Ikea furniture (it made sense in my fear addled brain), until I realized that I’d then be living in a mostly unfurnished home, and that creeped me out even more. But yes, this book scared the bejeezus out of me. That may or may not be due to the fact that I started in on a rainy night, because I am an idiot. I managed to finish it, but I had to wait until the sun was up and I had put the cats in another room. I would say this has taught me a lesson about the books I read, but that would also be a blatant lie. If it does get made into a tv series, I get the feeling I’ll waffle terribly, before caving to curiosity (because again, I can be an idiot).
Thanks to this review and my subsequent read of this book I will now have a totally different perspective of IKEA when I walk in the store and I WILL NOT go shopping after dusk. 🙂
Thanks for the recommendation for something out of my normal reading habits. 🙂
If anyone is interested. Here is the book trailer. https://youtu.be/HfrwSkUQEQo
[…] 6 – Horrorstör / Grady Hendrix .- Toulouse : Milan, 2015 (un avis en angliche) […]
“But to my American ears the word is the perfect stand in for IKEA – a word clearly selected at random by marketing officials who didn’t think this through.”
Just dropping in to clarify (this is obviously VERY IMPORTANT) that IKEA isn’t a random set of letters, it’s an acronym containing the founder’s initials, and the first letters in the name of the farm where he grew up and in the name of his hometown. Also, all IKEA product names have a certain logic to them (and mean something). They’re not just selected at random. This is highly googlable, so I won’t bore you with the details.
Also, this book is relevant to the Bitchery in another way – see the shelving unit aptly named Kjërring? Yes, that’s mashup, oddly spelled/umlauted ScandiNordic for bitch. (Bonus fact: the ‘stör’ in ‘Horrorstör’ means ‘disturb’, so the title is essentially Horrordisturb.)
Finally, since there’s now another Grady Hendrix book reviewed on the site, it would be great if someone could fix the typo (Grady ‘Hendix’) in the link below the cover image, since it doesn’t lead to anything.
@Anna:
Thank you and thank you – fixed! That’s absolutely fascinating. (Now I want a shirt that says “Kjërring.”)