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Horrorstör: A Novel
by Grady Hendrix
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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 comes packaged in the form of a glossy mail order catalog, complete with product illustrations, a home delivery order form, and a map of Orsk’s labyrinthine showroom.…
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"Ever felt lost and disoriented in a huge imported furniture emporium of Scandinavian design? It’s a little sinister, right? So why did it take so long for someone to set a hilarious horror novel in what’s essentially a haunted Ikea? (It’s called Orsk in the novel.) Horrorstör’s grimly funny pleasures include the novel’s sendups of Ikea catalogs, complete with advertisements for Potemkin armchairs, Müskk beds and Lågniå water glasses. The plot — wage slaves up against corporate indifference and a gruesomely vengeful ghost — is mostly an excuse for such lines as, “There is a dead man on the Frinjk!” But author Grady Hendrix’s wit and trenchant observations about retail culture exceed Horrorstör’s silly concept. The book’s been plucked up for TV by the executive who developed Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel."