Horrorstor: A Novel

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His plan is to spend the night in the building with a strategic strike team that will be ready to catch these neer-do-wells in the act! But since he doesn't have access to any professionals, he's willing to go in with two of his employees, Amy and Ruth Anne. Neither of them is at all qualified to do anything other than point and scream if they were to run across someone messing up the store in the middle of the night. 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. From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires comes a hilarious and terrifying haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting: a furniture superstore. The more Amy struggled, the faster she sank. Every month she shuffled around less and less money to cover the same number of bills. The hamster wheel kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Sometimes she wanted to let go and find out exactly how far she’d fall if she just stopped fighting. She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?”

And thoroughly enjoyed it! It gave off a Silent Hill vibe in the way that the store and the old prison became one after hours, and was haunted by the old penitents. A vampire's hunger for blood may be insatiable, but this masterpiece novel ladles out ample thrills, chills, and relevant examples of sociopolitical injustices to satisfy any literary appetite.” 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. Hendrix’s darkest novel yet will leave readers begging for an encore.”— Booklist, starred review, on We Sold Our Souls Orsk Furniture Superstore in Cleveland, OH is experiencing unexplained product damage when the store is closed. Employees arrive first thing in the morning to a store in complete disarray but nothing is captured on surveillance video. Store management is in a tizzy and corporate has scheduled a visit!Look, I can’t slam a store I know nothing about. In fact, I think that I might have been a big fan of IKEA – to me, when something is working and doing its job, I really couldn’t care less what it looks like. This is a quality that annoys my wife to no end. Before she bought me a FOSSIL watch as a wedding gift, I used to wear watches that were cheap enough to throw away at the first sign of trouble.

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. It was worth every single great review that it got. This was a horror story that took you in and threw you into a maelstrom of madness – it got my heart rate up more than once. Can you think of anything scarier than an asylum with torture devices that would have made the Inquisition jealous? No, I’m not giving too much away, you will still need to take the journey yourself to find out. Orsk, an Ikea rip-off store, is hell. Retail hell - something Hendrix seems to be very familiar with.Outside, Amy and Basil are treated by emergency teams, who inform them that they are the only ones who made it out of the store. ORSK's corporate people offer them cushy corporate jobs in exchange for their silence, which Amy refuses out of disgust. Months pass; during this time, a new store, Planet Baby, is built out from the remains of ORSK. Amy gets a job there and, on the first day, encounters Basil. The two vow to rescue Matt and Trinity, a task Basil says will be difficult because the penitents are less organized now that Worth is gone. The book ends with an advertisement stating that Planet Baby will hold a 24-hour sale, allowing patrons to remain in the store overnight. 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? I’ve worked countless overnights and let me tell you, sometimes you do get a bit freaked out/chills down your spine when it’s 2:15 AM and you can hear a pin drop in a completely empty and quiet retail store. Especially when you start hearing the usual random noises throughout the night as I loved the authenticity of how Hendrix captured all that. I don’t know if he’s ever worked in retail or asked people that did but my goodness, combining that with all the crazy horror in this book was perfect. They all will stand for that rough day/Night...at an exceptional night shift to investigate A series of Weird events..

WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THIS WHOLE BOOK? There was no ending and I didn't care either because I just wanted it to be over. It's one of those books that ends in the middle of something to add a dot dot dot fill in the blank with what might happen here who knows!??!? I really I don't care. when you can't say if it's day or night .. the store is time still with all the light and no windows or skylights. 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.As someone who worked retail in and outside of IKEA, I felt this book on a deeply visceral level. I feel like Hendrix wrote this for my poor bedraggled retail battered soul. And, even though IKEA as a company is better than others, it can get a bit Stepford Wives in upper management. IKEA has inane terms and culture; there is constant upselling and forced smiles and a vast rat-maze-like store trying to funnel you as much as possible. If you have been told that your presentation is not IKEA, you don’t have that coworker attitude; your feet hurt constantly, you have been called names by customers, yelled at for policies, and must do it all again with a smile, this story is for you. I think I am channeling some inner past trauma here. I liked the fact that there was actually character development in this novel. For instance, I started off really despising Basil, but he slowly grows on you as the novel goes on. Ruth Anne also shows different facets of herself that you initially don't believe she has in her. Of course, you probably never had a séance on one of the dining room tables you were supposed to be selling (again, I say, hilarious), but admit it—you probably kind of thought about it once or twice. (No? No one else? Okay, FINE.)