Book number 112 for 2023; 5.75 stars (that’s as high as The StoryGraph goes).
This is my second Grady Hendrix book (the first was the Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), and I enjoyed this one every bit as much as the first one. I love Hendrix’s writing. He starts out light, even funny, and it gradually gets to a point where it’s simply not funny anymore. Actually, it may not be all that gradual. It’s like there’s suddenly a point in the book when it’s serious and frightening from that point on.
In Horrorstor, we experience a day and a night in the life of Orsk employee Amy (I’m not sure we ever got last name). Orsk is an Ikea knockoff. You know, one of those stores where everything has to be assembled. Everything comes in a flat box, but it is all displayed very pleasingly in the showroom, as you follow the Bright and Shining Path. What do I know? I’ve never been to Ikea.
The troubles begin one morning, when the card reader next to the employee entrance wouldn’t work, so no one could gain access to the building. They were all diverted to the customer entrance where Basil, the manager, was set to let them in. But the escalator was going the wrong direction. A maintenance guy was trying to stop it, so they could at least use it as stairs, but to no avail.
At one point, Amy asks Matt (another employee) how they were supposed to clock in. “Don’t be in such a hurry,” he said. “There’s nothing waiting inside but retail slavery, endless exploitation, and personal subjugation to the whims of our corporate overlords.” I’ve worked at Sears. That is a pretty accurate statement!
Things went downhill from there. Things inside the store were broken, smashed. There was a disgusting substance all over one of the couches. Basil decided that he and two other employees needed to spend the night there to see if they could find out who was doing all these things. Amy was one of those people. She was “voluntold” to do it, along with Ruth Anne, who may have been one the sweetest people I have ever seen in a book.
It is, of course, during this night that everything really begins to go bad. At one point, Amy and Ruth Anne encounter Matt and Trinity making out on one of the couches (they are not supposed to be in the building). But the reason Matt and Trinity are in there is that they are working on some kind of “ghost hunter” kind of presentation. They are convinced that there is supernatural activity going on. So they start working together on this, all the while trying to hide from Basil the fact that Trinity and Matt are even in there.
At one point, they learn that the store was built on the previous site of a prison that existed there in the late eighteen hundreds. Anyone seen Poltergeist? “They’re here!!!”
That’s all of the plot that I will give away. But from that point on, things aren’t funny, anymore. Deadly serious, and Hendrix conjures up images that even I had trouble imagining. Gruesome and scary, indeed.
I found the ending, however, to be extremely satisfying. Much is left open to the reader’s imagination at the end. You can make it end however you want it to, I suppose.
I have a lot more Grady Hendrix to read, and am sure I will get to some of it next year.
TTFN, y’all!
The Constant Reader 