If a business is successful enough, other business will pop up trying to copy the model. That's how we wind up with Orsk, a cheap Ikea knock-off central to Horrorstor. Amy sells desks in the Home Office section of Orsk. She just wants to get through the next few days without issue so she can be transferred back to the first store she worked at. Her manager, Basil, is riding her hard and she's convinced she will be fired before she can complete the transfer. The new Orsk location seems to have different plans for all the employees, locking the doors, reversing the escalators, and blocking keycard access to the employee entrance at the start of the day shift.
A lot of horror novels start with a gimmick. It's an easy way to focus your writing on a single idea. Grady Hendrix writes a haunted house novel set in Ikea (I mean, an Ikea-like store) and it works.
Think about it. The Ikea concept is built around disorienting the shopper. There is one long path that winds through every possible home or office configuration you could ever need. There are shortcuts between sections, sure, but they pop you into the middle of an aisle of product or display, not back on the path towards the exit. The entire point is to slow you down and convince you that you need more things than you do.
Now imagine being trapped like Amy, Basil, and her coworkers one night in Orsk. The store is facing a wave of vandalism that happens when the security lights go dim and no employees are on duty. The Orsk workers tasked with finding the vandal are navigating that labyrinth at night by memory. That's creepy enough without even getting into the source of the haunting and the horrors that swell into the store at the halfway point of the novel.
Grady Hendrix has a clean, dry tone that works very well in Horrorstor. There's a level of cynicism in most of the characters that creates a great punch when things go bad. Each of the five employees locked in the store believes in one aspect of Orsk more than any other and are forced to confront the reality of corporate ethos and hidden history in a big way.
What really enhances the experience of Horrorstor is the actual layout and design of the novel. It's presented like an Ikea catalogue. Each chapter is introduced with a blueprint drawing of a relevant product available at this particular Orsk location. The copy underneath the drawing foreshadows what's to come in the story, amping up the suspense when things take a turn for the sinister. Everything about the novel, from the shape of the page to the blue text on white paper, forces you into the context of that Ikea-like shopping experience. It's the inescapable reminder of the concept of the novel, like the color shifts in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski or the word art in The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall.
If you're going to go all in on a one sentence horror concept, you really need to commit. Grady Hendrix sells the haunted house novel in Ikea concept better than I could have ever imagined. It works equally well as corporate satire and horror. It's also rock solid, laying down the foundation for a ghastly series of twists from the first page. To put it bluntly, I haven't been this scared by a new horror novel since Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box seven years ago. You're not going to shake off Horrorstor anytime soon.
