Book Review: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix
Goodreads Description: Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.
To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.
A traditional haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, Horrorstör is designed to retain its luster and natural appearance for a lifetime of use. Pleasingly proportioned with generous French flaps and a softcover binding, Horrorstör delivers the psychological terror you need in the elegant package you deserve.
My Review: If you're looking for a novel version of the low-budget, B-grade horror movies that you watch when you want to turn your brain off, this book will be perfect for you.
If you're looking for a story that says something about capitalism, consumerism, the psychology of surveillance, haunted houses, etc., then you will be disappointed. Horrorstor is a traditional horror that's not as much fun as the cover design and blurb would lead you to believe. Spliced between chapters are rather funny depictions of torture devices framed as furniture ads, yet the book doesn't play with these ideas of torture and consumerism at all. They just become objects in the story used to... you guessed it... torture. I assumed, based on the book's design, that the story would have an
element of satirical humour to it, but it's written as a straight
gore-porn horror, which was disappointing. The book's design and the actual story do seem disjointed in that way.
Not only does the story take itself too seriously, but there's no substance to it. The beginning implies that the characters are going to "learn" something -- that the ghost will teach them "the error of their ways" -- yet this falls painfully flat because the character's are so two dimensional that there's no depth for Hendrix to explore. Characters are punished by the ghost for being bad workers, but the narrative isn't consistent on whether the ghost is right or wrong in punishing them. Amy, the protagonist with an anti-corporate mindset, is punished by the ghost for not being a "team player," but the book waffles on whether being a "team player" is actually a good change for her. Is the ghost right, does she need to change? Or is it trying to brainwash her into being a corporate drone? The book dabbles with these questions but drops them very quickly, making it unclear how Amy's character development should progress. For a book that marketed itself as looking at the "horrors of consumerism," it doesn't have a clear stance on the subject at all. The book pushes an anti-capitalist perspective through Amy, but it also routinely chastises that perspective. It's like the book wants to be anti-capitalist without understanding what that means. The ending also falls flat, both as a commentary on capitalism and as a conclusion to the narrative. It's a shame, because there's a real solid idea housed within these pages, but the execution was way off.
TL;DR: All in all, 2/5 stars. All flair and no substance makes Horrorstor an underwhelming flop.
