🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "Horrorstör" by Grady Hendrix

As a piece of retail-based horror fiction, I wondered how this book would stack up against The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell. In that book, a chain bookstore built on an enchanted patch of ground causes those who linger too long to regress to a primitive and violent state. In this book, retail workers in Orsk, an explicit knockoff of Ikea, must confront the ghosts lingering on their own patch of land, which was the site of the Cuyahoga Panopticon (or "Beehive") - a nineteenth-century penitentiary where a sadistic warden tried to normalize his inmates' deviance through mindless toil.

I've been excited to read this book after I bought it at The Strand (name drop) earlier this year. The book's art is designed to reflect its Ikea roots - every chapter starts with the brochure notes on an item for sale in the Orsk catalog, starting with normal furniture and home items that feature in the chapter and proceeding from there into more sinister territory. After a rash of petty vandalism, store manager Basil enlists hard-working spinster Ruth Anne and slacker protagonist Amy to watch the store overnight with him and try to catch the perpetrators in the act. They are joined by Matt and Trinity, aspiring ghost hunters who are attempting to shoot a demo reel for their proposed show. As you can imagine, they end up with more ghosts than they bargained for.

Ramsey Campbell actually worked in a Borders before writing The Overnight, and Grady Hendrix presumably worked in retail at some point in his career. The connection between the repetitive, brain-rewiring labor of the Beehive and that of the retail work is referenced explicitly; and when the protagonists gain access to the Beehive, we are reminded that both the prison and the store rely on scripted disorientation to manipulate those inside. Early on in the story, after the Warden appears and curses the characters, Amy is caught by the ghostly, faceless penitents and is strapped into a Hügga chair, which restrains her in order to, as the Warden says, cure her of her restless, wandering spirit. She has the epiphany that she should stop struggling in life, struggling to go to school and pay the bills and keep her car running, and simply surrender to the world and work in retail as she was born to. This is an interesting scene, and a large part of Amy's subsequent character development is in overcoming this "epiphany."

Did It Scare Me?

On one hand, I have never worked in retail, so I was unable to connect with the book on that level. I did go to an Ikea for the first time this year, though, so I have that frame of reference. The book is definitely gimmicky, but in a fun way. The illustrations and funny captions from the Orsk catalog ornamenting each chapter heading detract from the horror somewhat, but this runs in the other direction when one opens to a page covered in the chilling prison graffiti, or processes the separation from the outside world, as emergency workers are chronically (supernaturally?) unable to find the highway cutoff that houses the store. I liked the book, but its efforts to expand the "world" ended up rendering it less immersive than others have been.