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, theyâll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.
So I wonât be going to IKEA any time soonâŠ
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 wasnât 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 isnât meeting sales targets, they had best find out who/what was smearing âsubstancesâ on the furniture at night.
Orsk is IKEAâs 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 âghost huntingâ type show (or make out, in Mattâs 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 âhydrotherapy bathâ 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: âThe hard work makes Orsk your family, and the hard work is free.â to âWork makes you free.â. The store is built on an old penitentiary that used hard labour and, essentially, torture devices to render the prisoners/penitents insane, the phrase âWork makes you freeâ is one commonly seen in Nazi concentration camps. Josiah Worth âseem[ed] to revelâ in the torture of his penitents, coupled with this slogan, that attitude made me very uncomfortable, which Iâm sure was the point, but was unpleasant to read.
Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed Horrorstör. I liked that Amy and Basil, âthe clown and the foolâ 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 donât 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!
This book is about two teenage boys, Ari and Dante, who become friends over the summer and through letters, broken bones and confusion, try to find their place in the world and their families.
Books For Becca 