After noticing a few strange things going awry after hours (such as someone taking a bathroom break on a couch), Team Manager Basil wrangles in employees Amy and Ruth Anne to help him investigate the Orsk store. Except, more was going on then they believed.
Why this book?: I saw an interesting review on it, and was looking for something SyFy-movie-esque. Meaning I wanted gory, cheap, and hilarious, while still adding in a little bit of fright.
I never liked IKEA anyways
From the moment I opened this book, I could tell what it was. If Orsk is a parody of IKEA, then this book is a complete parody of the horror genre. I went into this book looking for cheap horror, and I got a little more than I was expecting. Not only was it cheap horror, it was also cheap characters, cheap writing, but a brilliant formatting.
The book is made to look like an IKEA catalog, and, while reading through the story, each chapter beginning got creepier and creepier, as they started with just summaries of normal “Orsk” furniture. There were even little coupons in the back of the book, with fake descriptions. If you read through everything, I’m sure you would have found little gems that would have made you laugh.
Not only that, but the setting was pretty accurate-designed to keep you there for hours! I loved how it mocked the setting, while also making it life-like and believable.
With how close the setting was to a real IKEA store, I’m still quite hesitant to go near one after reading this book.
Gore-fest and oddities
It’s a classic ghost story, which I thought was a nice touch, with just a bit too much gore. There were parts when I needed to put the book down and take a break because the gore was described in so much detail that even my stomach couldn’t handle it. And, after a certain length of the book, I would say about half, it goes from no gore to too much gore.
Along with that, there were just some unnecessary additions. The author added in way too many characters, and for some reason he couldn’t keep track of them-there were only two or three characters together at once, mainly because the others were either somewhere else or missing. If you can’t handle so many characters-cut them! Even then, the characters Hendrix added were very annoying.
Final Rating: ★★★☆☆
Overall?
While the story was nice, I found that there was too much graphic gore-despite that being the exact thing I was looking for. Most, if not all, of the characters were either annoying or unnecessary, but the formatting was pretty funny.
Would I Recommend?
If you’re sensitive to gore, no. If you’re looking for an actual horror book, no. This is just for entertainment-cheap gore, not for actual thrills. Don’t read this book if you’re not looking for a parody of the entire horror genre.
Additional Information
Published: September 23rd, 2014
Publisher: Quirk
Page count: 248
Genre: Humor/Mystery/Horror
Synopsis: via Goodreads
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.
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