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A review by millennial_dandy
Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
3.0
3.5 rounded down to 3
"At Orsk, we're like a family."
Oh, man, this is difficult. Another reviewer said that 'Horrorstör' felt like someone's published Nanorimo project, and I think they kind of nailed it. That's not to say that this was bad -- it wasn't, but it reads like something the author didn't let marinate long enough to be able to see its weaknesses. Which is such, such, a shame because I think everyone who picked this up agrees it's got great bones.
Setting a horror story in a knock-off Ikea and having as the underlying exploration the comparison of working retail at a box store to doing manual labor in prison is excellent. Some reviewers seemed to think this comparison was too obvious to be interesting, yet as a society we're pretty comfortable setting people up with jobs in box stores so... (then again, as a society we're pretty comfortable with setting convicts to work within a punitive justice system so...)
The image of this type of job being a punishment, making convicts and penitents of anyone convicted of not being smart enough or ambitious enough or rich enough to do any better within our current economic system (one that makes a total mockery of the notion of a meritocracy) is one that any Socialist would fervently back up as diabolical but true, and any Capitalist would dismissively scoff at.
Using Ikea as the springboard but then building Orsk up as the poor man's knockoff version to make the bland, cheaply-made consumer goods meant to feed masses starving to participate in a post-Capitalist hellscape of materialism designed to fill the void even more hollow is so depressing it almost loops back around to give you the giggles.
The description of how the store is set up to force customers along curated tracks designed to maximize profits, the silly trademark names for everything, the brand-specific lingo ('Need assistance? Just Orsk!'), the Potemkin showrooms inside the store, it's all so familiar that I could picture it without even trying.
And honestly, the character of 'Orsk' (the corporate entity, the building) is scarier than anything else we meet in the novel -- and we meet some pretty nasty 'creepy-crawlies' by the time it's over. Because 'Orsk' is real, even if that exact iteration of it isn't. And it's a beast of our own creation run amok. Like, sure, Orsk in the novel is 'not-Ikea', but this could have taken place at one of the Disney parks (we'll call it 'Bellamy Kingdom' and they have a mascot named Benney Beaver) with little alteration because whether it's a furniture and home goods store or 'the happiest place on earth' a corporation is a corporation, and the things they produce will only ever be able to manufacture authenticity; the chat GPT output if given the prompt: 'what things do humans want?'
Unfortunately, the execution wasn't strong enough to hold up all of author Grady Hendrix's ambitions for 'Horrorstör.' It's like he spent so much time developing the character of 'Orsk' that he forgot to develop any of the others. And by the way, this was yet another horror novel suffering from 'too many characters-itis'. I get the temptation, I do: the more characters, the more 'ghoulish occurrences' set-pieces you write to ratchet up the terror, the more menacing and fleshed out the horror reveal at the end feels. But even so, one of the store employees needed to go. Probably Matt. Nothing would have changed had he not been there.
Ditto with the entire seance thing. I understand the temptation to write about a group of people attempting a traditional, Victorian seance in a 'not-Ikea' store just because it's so absurd. But even though that image invites a little chuckle at the weird juxtaposition, that little chuckle wasn't worth the entire ghost hunters thing that came along with it and ultimately went nowhere (very slowly, I might add). It was because of this that I almost DNF'd the book as the pages and pages of this continued to rack up.
No.
There were so many ways we could have made the leap from Point A to Point B that would have been faster, cleaner, not forced the story to slam its breaks, and that would have been freakier. The fake doors in the showrooms being secret portals to the hellish world of the Panopticon would have felt so much creepier and effective if that would have been it -- no seance, no wild goose chase trying to catch the homeless man hiding out on the show floor; cut it all out: kill your darlings.
Would cutting all of that have turned this already shortish novel into a novella? Yes, and that's what it should have been. I would have much preferred a lean novella that trusted its readers to understand the references rather than explaining them or grounding them in reality for no good reason other than to shut up the potential reader with bad reading comprehension who might whine that not everything was explained into the ground.
sigh
Can you tell this reading experience really riled me up?
That all said, I don't think the final project is a trainwreck, and it's still quite readable and I enjoyed it as-is; it just frustrates me that it wasn't great Because conceptually it had the potential to be truly great with just a modicum of extra effort, just a little bit more time spent in editing.
If only...
Quite a few people mentioned that this would make a good horror film, and all I can say is: yes, but please, god, let it be put together by someone who's willing to take it where the source material wasn't able to go. Although, I have to admit it would be humorously ironic if a book about the soullessness of modern consumer culture were adapted into a soulless cash-grab film.
Something to think about.
"At Orsk, we're like a family."
Oh, man, this is difficult. Another reviewer said that 'Horrorstör' felt like someone's published Nanorimo project, and I think they kind of nailed it. That's not to say that this was bad -- it wasn't, but it reads like something the author didn't let marinate long enough to be able to see its weaknesses. Which is such, such, a shame because I think everyone who picked this up agrees it's got great bones.
Setting a horror story in a knock-off Ikea and having as the underlying exploration the comparison of working retail at a box store to doing manual labor in prison is excellent. Some reviewers seemed to think this comparison was too obvious to be interesting, yet as a society we're pretty comfortable setting people up with jobs in box stores so... (then again, as a society we're pretty comfortable with setting convicts to work within a punitive justice system so...)
The image of this type of job being a punishment, making convicts and penitents of anyone convicted of not being smart enough or ambitious enough or rich enough to do any better within our current economic system (one that makes a total mockery of the notion of a meritocracy) is one that any Socialist would fervently back up as diabolical but true, and any Capitalist would dismissively scoff at.
Using Ikea as the springboard but then building Orsk up as the poor man's knockoff version to make the bland, cheaply-made consumer goods meant to feed masses starving to participate in a post-Capitalist hellscape of materialism designed to fill the void even more hollow is so depressing it almost loops back around to give you the giggles.
The description of how the store is set up to force customers along curated tracks designed to maximize profits, the silly trademark names for everything, the brand-specific lingo ('Need assistance? Just Orsk!'), the Potemkin showrooms inside the store, it's all so familiar that I could picture it without even trying.
And honestly, the character of 'Orsk' (the corporate entity, the building) is scarier than anything else we meet in the novel -- and we meet some pretty nasty 'creepy-crawlies' by the time it's over. Because 'Orsk' is real, even if that exact iteration of it isn't. And it's a beast of our own creation run amok. Like, sure, Orsk in the novel is 'not-Ikea', but this could have taken place at one of the Disney parks (we'll call it 'Bellamy Kingdom' and they have a mascot named Benney Beaver) with little alteration because whether it's a furniture and home goods store or 'the happiest place on earth' a corporation is a corporation, and the things they produce will only ever be able to manufacture authenticity; the chat GPT output if given the prompt: 'what things do humans want?'
Unfortunately, the execution wasn't strong enough to hold up all of author Grady Hendrix's ambitions for 'Horrorstör.' It's like he spent so much time developing the character of 'Orsk' that he forgot to develop any of the others. And by the way, this was yet another horror novel suffering from 'too many characters-itis'. I get the temptation, I do: the more characters, the more 'ghoulish occurrences' set-pieces you write to ratchet up the terror, the more menacing and fleshed out the horror reveal at the end feels. But even so, one of the store employees needed to go. Probably Matt. Nothing would have changed had he not been there.
Ditto with the entire seance thing. I understand the temptation to write about a group of people attempting a traditional, Victorian seance in a 'not-Ikea' store just because it's so absurd. But even though that image invites a little chuckle at the weird juxtaposition, that little chuckle wasn't worth the entire ghost hunters thing that came along with it and ultimately went nowhere (very slowly, I might add). It was because of this that I almost DNF'd the book as the pages and pages of this continued to rack up.
No.
There were so many ways we could have made the leap from Point A to Point B that would have been faster, cleaner, not forced the story to slam its breaks, and that would have been freakier. The fake doors in the showrooms being secret portals to the hellish world of the Panopticon would have felt so much creepier and effective if that would have been it -- no seance, no wild goose chase trying to catch the homeless man hiding out on the show floor; cut it all out: kill your darlings.
Would cutting all of that have turned this already shortish novel into a novella? Yes, and that's what it should have been. I would have much preferred a lean novella that trusted its readers to understand the references rather than explaining them or grounding them in reality for no good reason other than to shut up the potential reader with bad reading comprehension who might whine that not everything was explained into the ground.
sigh
Can you tell this reading experience really riled me up?
That all said, I don't think the final project is a trainwreck, and it's still quite readable and I enjoyed it as-is; it just frustrates me that it wasn't great Because conceptually it had the potential to be truly great with just a modicum of extra effort, just a little bit more time spent in editing.
If only...
Quite a few people mentioned that this would make a good horror film, and all I can say is: yes, but please, god, let it be put together by someone who's willing to take it where the source material wasn't able to go. Although, I have to admit it would be humorously ironic if a book about the soullessness of modern consumer culture were adapted into a soulless cash-grab film.
Something to think about.