Horrorstör

by Grady Hendrix

Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594745263
Publisher:	Quirk Publishing
Publication date:	09/23/2014
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	20,071
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of several New York Times best sellers including How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, and many more. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and sold over two million copies. He also writes nonfiction, and his history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction.

Read an Excerpt

It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end. Later they’d be resurrected by megadoses of Starbucks, but for now they were the barely living dead. Their causes of death differed: hangovers, nightmares, strung out from epic online gaming sessions, circadian rhythms broken by late-night TV, children who couldn’t stop crying, neighbors partying till 4 a.m., broken hearts, unpaid bills, roads not taken, sick dogs, deployed daughters, ailing parents, midnight ice cream binges.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Horrorstor"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Grady Hendrix.
Excerpted by permission of Quirk Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

07/28/2014
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Horrorstör delivers a crisp terror-tale...[and] Hendrix strikes a nice balance between comedy and horror.”—TheWashington Post

“Disarming.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Wildly inventive...Hendrix delivers both a palm-sweating horror story and a laugh-out-loud satire of retail.”—Esquire

“Highly giftable.”—Buzzfeed

“Hendrix conjures up some wonderfully gruesome imagery.”—Nerdist

“An inventive, hilarious haunted house tale.”—Bustle

“Hendrix’s one-of-a-kind novel is an innovative hybrid of ghost story and satire, at once clever, gruesome, and hilarious.”—Amazon Book Review
 
“If you’ve ever been frustrated trying to put together furniture from IKEA, you’ll get a laugh out of Hendrix’s spoof mystery.”—New York Post

“Hendrix is an engaging writer.”—Santa Fe New Mexican

“A clever little horror story...[and] a treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A fun horror novel.”—Library Journal
 
“A very clever ghost story.”—Booklist

“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.”—Publishers Weekly

More praise for Grady Hendrix:
“National treasure Grady Hendrix follows his classic account of a haunted IKEA-like furniture showroom, Horrorstor (2014), with a nostalgia-soaked ghost story, My Best Friend’s Exorcism.”—The Wall Street Journal, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“Pure, demented delight.”—The New York Times Book Review, on Paperbacks from Hell

“Terrific... Sharply written... [My Best Friend’s Exorcism] makes a convincing case for [Hendrix’s] powers as a sharp observer of human behavior.”—The A.V. Club, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“Hendrix’s darkest novel yet will leave readers begging for an encore.”—Booklist, starred review, on We Sold Our Souls

“A true appreciation of the genre.”—Los Angeles Times, on Paperbacks from Hell

“Campy. Heartfelt. Horrifying.”—Minnesota Public Radio, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“Clever, heartfelt, and get-under-your-skin unnerving.”—Fangoria, on My Best Friend’s Exorcism

“A good, creepy, music-tinged thriller.”—CNET, on We Sold Our Souls

From the Publisher

2014-07-23
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 séance, 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Two narrators deliver this story, which revolves around a Swedish furniture store. Tai Sammons gives distinctive voices to the employees of the Orsk store, and Pinchot enthusiastically reads the store’s catalogue. The narrative follows bitter, sarcastic Amy, caught in a cycle of personal failures, who accepts a graveyard-shift position to monitor suspicious, unsettling behavior. As the store’s dark history comes alive at night, Amy struggles to fight another downfall. Sammons’s performance has a tough, acidic edge that perfectly reflects Amy’s cynicism and resignation. Pinchot, meanwhile, sounds just like a commercial, with a tenor tone and perfectly convincing upbeat rhythm. A.K.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile