Top 5 Tuesday: Hufflepuff Picks!

Top 5 Tuesday is a tag hosted by Bionic Book Worm (link here), and this month the theme is Harry Potter houses! The third week was Hufflepuff (this is coming on Saturday to catch up since I missed last Tuesday) and my picks are based on the traits set out by Shanah which are:

They are hard working, determined, tenacious, loyal, honest, genuine, well rounded, fair and just, open minded, giving, good hearted, accepting, compassionate, practical, patient, unemotional, and dependable. Their loyalty is not given – it’s earned.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Here’s my non-fiction pick for this house. Alderton’s collection of essays/writings is really lovely to read and very honest, her stories about love and friendship are very relatable and paint a picture of a woman trying to live as honestly as possible and how her relationships develop. Dolly seems like a lovely person (I love her Instagram now after reading this) and I really enjoy reading this.

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johanssen

Kelsea Glynn is a Hufflepuff. She’s loyal (sometimes to people who probably don’t deserve it), tenacious, fair and compassionate (the massive use of the slavery/human trafficking plot in this series). She develops throughout the series and is a fierce little Hufflepuff at heart and I loved it.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

Two for one pick here. I picked these two because both novels have main characters and plots that depend on a sense of loyalty built up between the affected characters. The people trapped in Orsk develop loyalty towards each other and refuse to try and escape while the others are in danger, the girls in My Best Friend’s Exorcism fight the possession because of their strong relationship and loyalty to each other. I hope my best friend would try and exorcise me if I was ever possessed.

The Martian by Andy Weir

I forgot about this book! I keep doing that, then I remember it or the movie turns up on Netflix and I start reminiscing about the summer of 2015 when everything was so simpler. Anyway, MARK IS HUFFLEPUFF GOALS. A Gryffindor would end up making things worse somehow, a Ravenclaw would intellectualise everything too much and a Slytherin would never have ended up stranded alone on Mars in the first place. Hard working, determined, patient, openminded – sounds like a certain potato farmer that I remember fondly.

Book Review: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

Goodreads synopsis:

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.

So I won’t be going to IKEA any time soon…

Horrorstör follows Amy and a few other workers in an overnight stay at their store after they find various damages done to merchandise and room displays when they come into work in the mornings, damage that wasn’t there when the store cleaners left the night before. Basil, the deputy manager decides that as the higher ups are coming to see why the store isn’t meeting sales targets, they had best find out who/what was smearing ‘substances’ on the furniture at night.

Orsk is IKEA’s counterpart in Horrorstör, a fictionalised version of large furniture and homeware stores with unpronounceable product names that are just random Swedish sounding words. Amy, Ruth Anne and Basil stay past closing, unaware of the changes in the store, not knowing that the history of the land is haunting the site. They find Matt and Trinity, two other employees that have stayed in order to film a ‘ghost hunting’ type show (or make out, in Matt’s case) and eventually they are confronted with the warden, Josiah Worth, and his prisoners from The Beehive.

I really enjoyed this novel, I thought that the style was intriguing and suited the setting of the book (it looks like a catalogue). Each chapter begins with a diagram, ordinary furniture pieces at first but these change to torture devices as the novel goes on, still keeping the cheery tone of a catalogue as it describes a ‘hydrotherapy bath’ to keep them suffering again and again. It was fun to read, I was halfway through before I had to put it down (and then realised, alone in my house, that I was terrified of every little sound around me) and then I finished it in a few hours the next day (in daylight). Amy is the protagonist and she is funny yet able to admit that she is frightened and wants to leave, something that can be rare in horror protagonists. She denies that these people are her friends and claims to hate working at Orsk, yet goes back for them time and time again when they are in danger.

The only thing that I took issue with was a sign on the wall that transformed from the happy Orsk message: “The hard work makes Orsk your family, and the hard work is free.” to “Work makes you free.”. The store is built on an old penitentiary that used hard labour and, essentially, torture devices to render the prisoners/penitents insane, the phrase “Work makes you free” is one commonly seen in Nazi concentration camps. Josiah Worth ‘seem[ed] to revel’ in the torture of his penitents, coupled with this slogan, that attitude made me very uncomfortable, which I’m sure was the point, but was unpleasant to read.

Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed Horrorstör. I liked that Amy and Basil, “the clown and the fool” develop in the epilogue (though I was worried for a few pages that Amy might be planning to kill herself at the end) and get jobs at Planet Baby (the new store on the site of Orsk) to revisit The Beehive. While I don’t think there will be a sequel, Horrorstör is being adapted into a TV series, so if you enjoy the book, you can definitely look forward to that!