Horrorstor

July 28, 2014
Retail stores that peddle lifestyle philosophies to customers and employees get a comic drubbing in this diverting horror lampoon. When three employees of the Cleveland Orsk—a “fake IKEA act” of a furniture superstore—pull an overnight shift to find out who has been trashing store stock after hours, they are horrified to discover that the building is haunted by ghosts from a prison that stood there a century before, and that the maniacal warden intends to inflict his “rehabilitative” punishments on the store’s staff. Hendrix gleefully skewers Orsk and its real-life ilk by comparing the “scripted disorientation” of the store’s layout to that of the penitentiary, and the “numbing grind of repetitive labor” that the prisoners perform to the work of store employees. The plotting is minimal, but the book’s packaging as a catalog—complete with illustrations of increasingly sinister-looking furniture with faux Scandinavian names—gives it a charmingly oddball allure.

September 1, 2014
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings. You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they've made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That's the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own-the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It's cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu seance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story's advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.

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July 1, 2014

At a Cleveland-area Orsk home store (think Ikea), uptight store manager Basil convinces employees Amy and Ruth Ann to stay after closing one night to catch the vandal who is defacing company property. They run into two more employees who are also staking out the business after hours, but Matt and Trinity are hoping to find evidence of ghosts haunting the showroom. Both groups find more than they bargained for in this fun horror novel. You see, the company made a big mistake when it decided to build a new big-box warehouse on the site of a condemned prison. VERDICT The faux-Ikea line drawings of furniture and use of umlauts seems silly at first, and there is a fair amount of workplace humor, but the book gains momentum and will deliver enough scares for horror fans as well. This first novel may be gimmicky, but it is enjoyable.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2014
Imagine you're trapped overnight inside a big-box home-furnishings retaileran IKEA, saywhere strange, spooky things have been happening, and you'll have an idea what's in store for a few Orsk employees in this very clever ghost story. The story is entertaining (a group of staffers, one of them a wannabe ghost chaser, stay in the store overnight to see if they can catch the person responsible for some vandalizing that's been going on in the off-hours), and the book itself is laid out like an Orsk catalog, with illustrations of products and their descriptions at the head of each chapter. This isn't quite a comedyin fact, it gets pretty dark in a few placesbut it's full of goofy wit: two of the store's products, for example, are called Balsak and Gutevol (say them both out loud, and the second one backward). Another nifty offering from a publisher that seems to specialize in niftiness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)