Helen 2.0's Reviews > Horrorstör

Omigosh. So dumb. So funny. And actually kinda brilliant.

I got a physical copy of this book and I highly recommend it for the hilarious illustrations. The book is printed in a coffee table catalog sorta style with product pages and illustrations included that start out funny and get progressively more disturbing and distorted as the story descends into horror territory. So well done, I really applaud the author and his team for the production value on this book.

In Horrorstor, Grady Hendrix has created a knock-off Ikea brand called Orsk, which is basically exactly Ikea except even cheaper, worse quality, and it’s run by a bunch a Midwestern Americans pretending (badly) to be Nordic Europeans.



The main characters all work in the Orsk furniture showroom, and they’re all stuck in the endless corporate grind, getting ground to bits to varying degrees.

Inside the store there were no windows, no skylights, no wall clocks, no way of telling the time or the temperature. Like a casino, Orsk existed in an eternal now.

Amy, the narrating character, dreams of having what she calls a “sit down job”, but she can’t seem to break out of a long string of minimum wage retail jobs.

Nearly all of the plot occurs during a single night. Furniture has been going missing or turning up with disturbing, unexplainable damage in the middle of the night, and the culprit hasn’t been caught on security footage. So, several of the Orsk employees spend the night in the showroom, aiming to catch whoever they think has been sneaking in and vandalizing the store.

Orsk was so big it needed a certain number of people on the premises to keep it under control. Three of them weren’t enough. The store was stirring, restless, growing slowly. Emptied of people, Orsk felt dangerous.

They do find the cause of the damage, but it’s nothing like what they expected. The showroom sucks them into a horrorscape and refuses to let them go.



Beyond the comic appeal and the fun ghost-riddled horror story, the book also has some meaningful moments between characters, and the theme of “death by corporate grind” really struck true with me.

Great book, Grady Hendrix is becoming one of my insta-read authors.