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Horrorstör
- Narrated by: Tai Sammons, Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring wardrobes, shattered Brooka glassware, and vandalized Liripip sofa beds - clearly someone, or something, is up to no good. To unravel the mystery, five young employees volunteer for a long dusk-till-dawn shift and encounter horrors that defy imagination. Along the way, author Grady Hendrix infuses sly social commentary on the nature of work in the new 21st-century economy.
A traditional haunted house story in a contemporary setting, and full of current fears, Horrorstör delivers a high-concept premise in a unique style.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
Featured Article: Looking for a Fright? Here Are the Best Contemporary Horror Authors to Listen to Right Now
When it comes to horror, there’s no shortage of unique tales. Horror authors have a talent for mining our deepest fears and insecurities, then using them to tell fascinating, engaging, and horrifying stories. While there are so many classic horror authors to explore, this list focuses on a selection of current, contemporary writers whose works are as enthralling as they are terrifying.
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What listeners say about Horrorstör
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John Hestand
- 03-18-16
Welcome to ORSK!
This book was fantastic. I was never bored, always engaged. The scary scenes were real good. The story was fun. The characters were great, basil was my favorite. I highly recommend this book to anyone that's looking for a fun horror novel. Just sit back relax and enjoy the ride.
19 people found this helpful
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- Dave
- 03-08-16
For Those of Us Who've Spent Too Much Time in IKEA
Does anyone else out there have an aversion to IKEA? Like, someone suggests we pop over there real quick, maybe bribes you with coffee and cinnamon rolls, and then BAM. The whole Saturday has mysteriously disappeared? Wait, what just happened to me this past weekend?
Horrorstör is one part Office Space, and one part haunted house story. Thankfully, the haunted house in Horrorstör is essentially an IKEA.
I’m thoroughly enjoying Grady Hendrix’s Great Stephen King reread over at Tor.com (please note the presence tense, and my faith it’ll one day continue), and thought his White Street Society short stories exquisite dark humor, so when I heard he had a novel set in a Haunted IKEA (or, more accurately: ORSK, an IKEA competitor), I knew I had to check it out.
I’ve been to IKEA way more times than I’d like, and while I don’t have the Chuck Palahniuk/Fight Club aversion to it that some do, it does feel a bit like a gauntlet at times — winding around those labyrinthine aisles. Hendrix does a solid job of bringing us in from the street level with Amy, a young woman just barely getting by, and coming to the horrific realization that she really has no plan on where her life is going. But there’s been a lot of weirdness happening at ORSK, and when Amy’s offered a late night shift by her boss Basil along with three other employees, she really can’t turn it down. Things go downhill fast from there, in something of a creepy yet kind of hysterical way. There’s a nasty little seance scene that felt like something straight out of a Sam Raimi film, and I couldn’t stop laughing while listening to it.
But about two-thirds through the book, the story less somewhat less funny and more straight-up horror, and my interest waned a bit, and the ending seemed a bit sudden. Still, Hendrix does a good job with next-door characters that seem like they could’ve walked out of a Stephen King novel. Amy is easy for just about anyone who has been hard up for cash to relate to, but Basil — the African American store manager whose name evokes Basil Rathbone and who is evangelical about all the corporate propaganda — is particularly strong. Hendrix knows his horror tropes, and does a good job subverting them.
Tai Sammons does the heavy lifting narration-wise in Horrorstör. She’s got a solid, no frills everywoman narration that nails the protagonist pretty well, and gets by okay with the rest of the cast. Bronson Pinchot is essentially reading the chapter headers, and you can tell he’s having a blast. Together, they’re a winning combination.
I could be convinced to head back to Horrorstör one day, mostly for the first half and the solid narration. It left me a little cold in places, but generally I imagine I’ll have a lot more fun whenever I go back to IKEA thanks to Hendrix’s book.
Also, the coffee and cinnamon rolls.
37 people found this helpful
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- Brian P. Judy
- 04-24-15
Great Story, Even Better Read
Unique story with some insightful moments. It's playful, funny, and scary! It's read wonderfully, and put together well for an audiobook experience.
12 people found this helpful
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- damien cost
- 09-20-20
Very entertaining
I would not have given this book a chance if it wasn't included in the membership. It is a very tight and concise story. Good character development and does not deviant from the story.
8 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 11-27-20
Horrorstor scared the crap out of me
I thought I was immune to horror by now but Horrorstor is so visceral, so upsetting, that I gasped aloud, hand over mouth, several times. Listening to it was quite an experience.
7 people found this helpful
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- MrOcculture
- 05-08-17
Great concept, weak delivery.
Bad narration, when it wasn't robotic, it was boring. Read commas like periods.
Unlikable, and unintelligent protagonist. Generally dull characters.
The end makes no sense in terms of character decision, though that isn't surprising. Could've been great, but wasn't.
7 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-08-20
I’ll never look at IKEA the same
I had no expectations for this book, but was pleasantly surprised. The story was enjoyable with the perfect balance of macabre.
I listened to this a few months ago, and promptly forgot about it. Then, a few days ago, I was at an ikea, and I was so uncomfortable. Apparently, the visions in this book stay with you.
I hurried out of ikea without buying anything, so this book ended up saving me a lot of money.
6 people found this helpful
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- Chana Goanna
- 04-05-21
Part horror, part satire, 100% enjoyable
This starts out as an entertaining poke at IKEA (some of the product names are obscurely hilarious). Amy, broke and frustrated by her dead-end job and her corporate groupie boss, agrees to work a midnight shift to try and figure out who’s wrecking the inventory every night. Things turn dark and genuinely scary after a seance held by their airhead co-workers who are trying to get “the ghost” on film. There’s a surprisingly deep statement about the corporate American workplace and the alienation of workers who feel trapped in it. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, way more than I expected to. The narrator is just okay, but doesn’t detract from the book.
4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-19-20
Fantastic
Very well written and narrated. Definitely worth another read, it was worth a risk for a free book. But definitely worth a shot in my opinion, has a King sorta feel. Thd only thing i would say is it has a slight teenager demographic.
4 people found this helpful
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- Katie Pursinger
- 10-03-16
Not as scary as it thinks it is.
I really, really wanted to like this book. A great premise which floundered in its execution. It tries it's best, but it never gets beyond the initial elevator pitch of a haunted IKEA. It has some neat ideas that I wish we'd explored more. This book would be great if it were double the length and it gave itself time to dig into the characters, the setting, the store and the haunted stuff. This feels too rushed.
7 people found this helpful
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- G. Beverstock
- 03-11-16
Well worth it
I got expecting a ok story set in retail and was left pleasantly surprised. Loved the setting and the main character though the story itself was sort of a mix of Hellraiser and Silent hill. But what really popped for me was the little item descriptions for things in the store that punctuate each chapter. The other reader and the fact that as the story grew darker these description mirrored them was a refreshing change from the norm. If you like horror fiction I would suggest this is a good book to add to your collection.
6 people found this helpful
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- Miss C L Atcheson
- 05-09-19
Terrible
This book is so utterly terrible. The characters are very basic and annoying. The plot try’s to be layered and textured but falls flat. Totally unrealistic as far as how much some of these people love their jobs. Not scary at all. Worst book I’ve had in a very long time.
I never even review the books I get but felt this was so terrible I felt guilty not reviewing it incase anyone else gets duped by this!! 😹
5 people found this helpful
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- Swords and Spectres
- 08-06-21
Flat narration, flat story-telling
Horrorstör is one of those books that, as a keen horror fan, I've seen bouncing around on review sites since its release back in 2014. As a keen horror fan, I wish I'd left it bouncing around on those sites where it had a chance to be enjoyed by people rather than actively disliked by myself.
For my own, personal, experience, there were very few saving graces to be found within Horrorstör. What few there were simply weren't enough to drag it up from a one star score as everything I disliked about it weighed too heavily against it.
The positives: 1. It was short. When that is given as a positive, it's pretty much a negative as well. It says that, were the book of any greater length, the reviewer quite simply would have struggled. I would have struggled. 2. For the first thirty percent or so it went by relatively quickly and I was actually quite interested before the overnight stay in the store happened. I was curious, my spooky senses were tingling ... and then I was hit in the face with a spooky spade rather than tickled, teased and tantalised with a spooky tendril.
The negatives, for my money, were a bit more weighty. I felt the characters, practically all of them, were very unbelievable. Not a single one read like they could have been a real person. They either loved their job with more fervour than devout Christians love Jesus Christ, or loved whatever other character trait the author gave them with similar, if not even more zeal. Pretty much every character had only one aspect to them. That was either work horse, paranormal geek, womaniser etc ... and none of them were really allowed to branch out and have a second interest. Such instances of refusing to call the police when there are laws being broken because 'I love my job' not only made zero sense, but made me want to bang my head against the wall as it just felt incredibly forced. You could tell the author knew the police should have been called, decided he didn't want it to happen, so just shoe-horned a hard-to-swallow reason not to into the paragraph.
And everyone swallowed that reason.
Another reason this book failed to hit the sweet spots with me is that I like my horror to be a bit more slow-burn. Give things a chance to transition from non-belief, to 'oh, damn, something odd is happening here', to 'yup, there's such a thing as the paranormal.' What we got here was non-belief into full-belief in the space of a chapter or two with zero effort at making it feel like there was anything other than a switch being flipped. Everything about the horror in Horrorstör was very in your face which made it far less frightening. It had the feeling of a B-movie horror flick more than an actual thought out horror novel. However, having read 'The Final Girl Support Group' by the same author, I do wonder if that is simply the style he goes for and it's just not something that fits my personal preference.
I also felt the ending was a mixture of shoe-horned in, out of the blue and straight up forced. I managed to breeze through this in the space of a couple of days due to the fact that I was listening rather than reading. Were I reading a physical copy of this, I think I would seriously have struggled.
The narration was also a very weak aspect of this. It was split between a female narrator (who narrated the whole of the novel) and a male narrator (who narrated the pointless after chapter inserts advertising furniture). The female narrator had zero emotion to her. If nothing was happening, she read in a very flat, 'I'm just reading words off a page' kind of way. If something fast-paced and action-packed was happening, she read in a very flat, 'I'm just reading words off a page' kind of way. If the characters were under massive stress, pain, terror etc ... she read in a very flat, 'I'm just reading words off a page' kind of way. There was also next to no effort to differentiate between the voices of the characters. Her overall reading and narration wasn't bad, it was just the effort that should have been present, wasn't. The male narrator just didn't need to be there. The furniture adverts were pointless and served as nothing other than adding a few extra pages to a short novel.
4 people found this helpful
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- Daniel James Chapman
- 08-18-21
Dreadful.
This is quite honestly the worst book I have ever read. The characters are unrealistic with terribly annoying dialogue with limited development. That, coupled with the bad writing will bore you to tears. For example, you will hear the following often at the end of a sentence:
Amy said. Trinity said. Matt said. Basil said.
It felt like I was reading a book for the comprehension for 10 year olds.
I went through beginning to end and I was more frightened the last time I clipped my toe nails.
And the mention of this also being a comedy was the only thing laughable about it.
I have actually had more amusement reading the reviews. One reviewer has compared this as a mixture of Hellraiser and Silent Hill. As a big fan of both, it has no similarities to either. Comparing this to the work of Clive Barker and the original Silent Hill Team is a stretch.
This is more like a cheap, teen horror movie that is interrupted every chapter by apparently the author, who injects a few minutes of completely worthless advertising for the fictional furniture store this story is set in.
3 people found this helpful
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- Susi Moffat
- 09-01-18
Horrorstor
I LOVED this story- so unique and with so many twists. Interesting characters and great narration. Highly recommend
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- Charlie
- 01-20-22
Just not right- she said
She said, she said, she said....Once you hear it you will not be unable to cringe at all the "said".
Don't normally write reviews, but this book is just something else, in a bad way.
I don't write books either, but this poor book would probably be the result if I ever tried.
1 person found this helpful
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- Elliot Simpson
- 01-14-22
"It was just OK" I said
The story seemed ok at first and I was looking forward to where it could possibly go. The infomercials about the products was interesting and the way they got more and more sinister was my favourite part of the whole book. When the strange stuff started happening I was hooked, I really wanted to know what was going on and then when it was kind of explained half way through I started to lose more and more interest as the book went on. It all ended up being a bit too basic and not very scary at all.
Also the author really needs to find a better way of saying "She said" "He said" because at times it can get really really annoying.
1 person found this helpful
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- SoMrHarris
- 11-07-21
I really wanted this to be good
I lasted just over 2 hours before I had to switch off, I just couldn't finish it. The dialogue just ended up being "..." Amy said, "..." Amber said, "..." Amy said... Over and over again. I so wanted to like this book :(
1 person found this helpful
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- Rebekah
- 10-11-21
This is eye rollingly bad
This is so bad. I'm not sure where the comedy was supposed to be or the horror for that matter. Was the horror the awful attitude of the main character or how no one really acted like a real human being?
1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 09-20-21
Fun haunted house story
This was a fun, original take on a haunted house story. The accompanying PDF file was a great add-on and helped bring the story to life.
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- Vron
- 06-27-22
Loved it
A fun little horror- left me wanting a sequel. The main character drove me a little crazy at times, but her character traits were a part of the story. Would've loved to see some of the devices in the paperback. Bought a copy to look through and lend to people to read :)
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- Candice Appleby
- 11-13-21
It's okay, not fantastic
It was okay, not fantastic, just okay. The first 5 mins nearly drove me mad.
Was free tho
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-27-21
not funny or scary
entertaining but overall the story was weak and felt rushed not enough fleshing out of the actual scary bits and the main character was awful. probably ok for a newer horror reader but meh soz.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-13-21
ÖRSK ME ANOTHER BUT I'LL NEVER TELL, YOU FIÊND
First half achieves a mundane workplace set up with a likeable cast of characters, before the second half kicks it into full throttle horror survival. The haunted house story in knock off IKEA premise doesn't prepare you for some of the grizzlier scenes but the shock you feel is bigger because of it. Interludes between chapters feature product descriptions of furniture which shift into blackly comic segments breaking up the action and double as neat little set piece descriptions. The last one is a particularly effective without spoiling anything here. Make sure to flip through the accompanying pdf for additional ORSK content!
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- Kindle Customer
- 10-04-21
Horrorstör is amazing.
It's almost fluff horror but then on a double-take, it is actually so original, from theme to, heh, execution.
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- Ronnie Smart
- 09-23-21
Excellent fun!
Like a cross between IKEA-like hell and Silent Hill. Loved it. A wonderful novel.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-06-20
Interesting concept but not so well executed
I really liked the concept for this story and the Ikea-like world that was created. However, it ended up being a pretty basically written story with not a lot of good character development. I definitely wasn't a fan of the narrator sadly - not a lot of expression or enthusiasm. Perhaps this is why it was hard to warm to the characters.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-15-18
A comedy of horrors
Grady Hendrix manages to toe the line between satire and horror in this workplace-comedy-turned-nightmare. Clever and well paced, the novel takes the everyday horror of retail work and introduces real balls-to-walls horror. Unafraid of brutalizing his characters, Hendrix follows the journey of Amy- your run of the mill adult, stuck in a rut. While her character's journey was satisfying to hear, and her growth empowering, at times the narration fell a little flat. Tai Sammons perfectly captures the deadpan tone the satire needs, but sometimes the monotone made the last sentences of chapters seem unfinished.