Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
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.
Okay don’t come for me telling me I misspelled the title of the book by not putting in the umlaut over the “o” up there. (did you even know that is what the symbol is called? Confession: I didn’t until I looked it up for this review 😆)
I literally have ZERO idea how to do that with my limited, Xennial–but heavy on the GenX–mediocre computer skills. 😆
Sadly, the cover of this book was one of the best parts about it for me.
It had SUCH promise going in…I just finished 2 of Grady Hendrix’s other books, which I FRIGGIN LOVED….plus I am a self confessed Ikea lover. A scary satire based on the store sounded just like something I would have a blast reading.
This book is full of spot on commentary and generalisms about Ikea as a store and a company AND the culture of people who purchase from it (😳🙋♀️) AND capitalism in general.
All those parts was accurate AF!
Mix in some dark humor and scary ghosts and shit and this SHOULD have been a good damn time for me.
UGH. Man, was I wrong.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Maybe it was because the last two books of his were filled to the brim with 80s/90s nostalgia and this one wasn’t.
Maybe it was because the last two books were also filled with dark humor and this one just didn’t have as many as I wanted/needed.
I mean, there were funny parts, but I feel like it didn’t have enough like the other two did.
Or maybe it was because I enjoyed the other ones SO much that I set expectations way too unrealistically high and there was no possible way it could live up to my own hype.
It’s probably all those things combined…which created a perfect storm of “this book wasn’t that great”-ness.
The one good part about it was Bronson Pinchot (whassup Balki Bartokomos!!!!!) had brief narrating cameos doing fake commercials for Orsk in between chapters….definitely the highlight of this read for me and seriously the most entertaining part.
So….I’m glad to be done with this one.
Bummed about this pick of mine, yall.
Not a fan.