Are you ready for a horror book that looks like an Ikea catalog?
The horror genre, for all its apparent simplicity, often inspires peculiar forms of experimentation. In recent years, scary books such as House of Leaves , The Fifty Year Sword and The Raw Shark Texts have experimented with typography and layout. A different breed of horror mash-up has also arisen, driven by a playful merging of accepted notions of highbrow and lowbrow narratives—most notably in the surprise hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Other books and films, from various eras ( Freaks , The Blair Witch Project , The Amityville Horror ), have achieved cult status with a kind of post-modern framing, unusual in genre stories, that deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction. With less successful results, the movie The Devil Inside i rritated viewers with an ending that referred them to a website.
But until I encountered Horrorstör , I never knew that a tale of terror could coexist with helpful hints on home decorating and furnishing options. Grady Hendrix must have, deep in his past, some very bad experiences with do-it-yourself assembly, or perhaps suffered a painful breakup with an Ikea store clerk. In Horrorstör , he gets his revenge, constructing a haunted house novel in which the familiar creepy mansion is replaced by a mega-sized big box retail outlet.
You can tell by the cover that this isn't your typical horror novel. An attractive living room layout features the Kjëerring modular shelving system ($89, see page 78), and the streamlined Brooka couch ($299, see page 8). Open the catalog, and the first things you see are a store map, a home delivery order form, and a list of Orsk policies and shopping tips. These are interspersed with stale marketing copy and annoying company slogans ("If you ever have a question, just Orsk!").
If you were expecting Lovecraft , you are now staring at loveseats. Instead of "The Pit and the Pendulum," you can peruse the plinth and patio chair. Forget Mary Shelley , and buy some merry shelving.
I‘ll admit I was enticed by this odd presentation. Few things are harder to find than a truly original variant on an old genre story theme. Take your pick: locked room murder mystery; time travel tale; gunslinger comes to Wild West town; you name it—all of the genre angles have been worked over so many times that they have lost their freshness, smelling as stale as the crypt in an Edgar Allan Poe tale. And what could be more timeworn than stories about hauntings, perhaps the oldest plot of them all. Yet Hendrix comes up with a new twist on an ancient story.
Alas, once the reader gets beyond the opening illustrations and into the heart of the text, it turns into a fairly conventional narrative about slacker millennials in middle America. Our protagonist Amy has a low level job at the Orsk outlet in Cuyahoga County, Ohio—one of the 318 "partners" operating a huge superstore. She has a bad attitude and an even worse rapport with her boss Basil. Her relationship with family and roommates isn’t much better. She owes rent money, and fears that Basil is planning to fire her. We follow Amy through the course of her work day, and along the way, we are introduced to a range of stick figure characters—the loyal checkout counter worker, the airhead flirt, the hipster employee, the corporate grunt, and the like.
This is a letdown after the come-on of the cover and opening pages. Hendrix is a lackluster writer, only occasionally enlivening the proceedings with a comic twist or witty bit of dialogue. The characters are as flat as one of those Ikea boxes with the make-it-yourself table inside.
The backstory, however, is extravagant. What Hendrix lacks in writing chops he makes up for in imagination and bold conceptualization. Orsk, a massive seller of knock-off minimalist Scandinavian furniture, has situated a huge store on the site of an old nineteenth century prison, a panopticon straight out of the pages of Foucault and Bentham. At certain places in the store, pathways exist to an alternative universe in which the prison still exists, under the supervision of its demented warden. Most of the time, store employees and customers can go about their business, blissfully unaware of the darkness within, but occasionally—especially late at night— people move through various pathways that bring them from the benign normalcy of the shopping experience to the crazy pathology of an antiquated penitentiary.
Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon, his ideal prison—and perhaps the forerunner of the modern big box retail outlet.
There’s sweet symbolism here. In many ways, we are imprisoned by our consumer culture. Hendrix doesn't do much to build on this angle—a more skilled author could have done something with this implicit message in the book’s premise. But readers can impose their own metanarrative here about the degradation of mindless consumption. That’s a horror story that also deserves to be told.
The strange doings at this store can’t evade detection forever. The Orsk outlet in Cuyahoga County, Ohio has suffered from a series of problems—disappearing merchandise, acts of vandalism, and mysterious text messages (stating the one word 'help') sent to store employees. Amy and her colleague Ruth Anne are enlisted by Basil to stay with him overnight at the Orsk outlet, and try to determine what’s going on.
The novel gains momentum in its second half, as the night goes on, and the Orsk outbreak gets stranger and stranger. Okay, the dialogue doesn’t improve, and the characters don’t become any rounder (all the more surprising when you consider that only six of them dominate the novel—certainly Hendrix could impart a bit more weight and heft to them). But the plot gets more ingenious as a retail store gradually turns into a nineteenth century prison.
And whenever Hendrix returns to the format of a furniture catalog—which he does at the start of each chapter—he again dazzles. The items for sale change over the course of the novel, and soon start looking more like torture chamber accessories, and less like items to spruce up the guest bedroom. (Well, I guess that depends on what you think of your guests.) And Hendrix puts in subtle jokes—like the numbers 666 that appear in the catalog number of every product, or the hidden meanings in the names of the featured merchandise. Kjëerring , the brand name of the shelving system, means old woman in Norwegian. A table set is branded as Arsle , a Swedish slang word for buttocks. Drittsekk , the name of a modular seating system, is Norweigan for wanker. You get the idea. The humor is a step below Mark Twain's, or maybe even the full two fathoms, but still I left this book with a notion that Hendrix was working at multiple levels, and had put clever twists into the stitching of Horrorstör most readers would miss.
Still, there’s not enough here to convince me to be a return shopper at his emporium. At the conclusion of his novel, Hendrix tries to set up the possibility of a sequel. Hey, I don’t blame him. The Orsk mandate is brand expansion, and Hendrix is just doing more of the same. But when that new catalog arrives, I’ll stick it in the neighbor’s mailbox. Maybe they want a new Kjëerring or Arsle , and are willing to do their own assembly. For my part, I prefer works that arrive on my doorstep already finished and polished.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
E veryday is Black Friday at Grady Hendrix's Horrorstör
"The items for sale change over the course of the novel, and soon start looking more like torture chamber accessories, and less like items to spruce up the guest bedroom."