Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

 Horrorstor, horrorstor, where for art tho  horrorstor? 

But I digress. Horrorstor is a story about a group of store employees who stay past closing time at an ersatz-IKEA to get to the bottom of some strange happenings around their store before a team from Corporate show up to shut them down. Personally, although I liked the book well enough, I felt that it was kind of all over the place for a relatively short book. I was really into the first half of the book, thought it was building well, getting us introduced to the setting and the characters, keeping us in suspense about the nature of the strange goings-on, and then everything get cranked from a three to an eight in three pages and the intensity skyrockets. Pretty quickly over the next couple chapters the main character becomes separated from the others, and for me the book becomes less interesting. It's still a fun read, and some of the scenes in the book are truly horrifying. One of my favorite things is the inclusion of the ads for different pieces of furniture as foreshadowing at the beginning of each chapter, wondering how they'll figure into what happens next. That was a really great touch to ratchet up the suspense. Also, I am totally here for the social indictment against the dehumanizing nature of retail work and corporate culture's exploitation of workers. The allegorical levels to Horrorstor are interesting and thought proving. It is truly horrifying how much we have indeed bought into the belief that "Work is Freedom." All of which is to say, join a Union if you can, support your nearest family-owned farm, and buy local as much as possible. /end of line/