It’s an evening of pure, undiluted terror, brought to life with Hendrix’s descriptive language and deranged imagination. When a group of employees are forced to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift at the ORSK furniture superstore in Cleveland in an attempt to catch whoever’s been vandalizing merchandise overnight, they encounter far worse things than teenagers knocking over Kjerring bookshelves or shattering Glans water goblets. Horrorstör is a comment on capitalism, sure, but it’s also just a really, really good and inventive twist on the classic haunted house story. But this is Grady Hendrix we’re talking about - author of the excellent My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide For Slaying Vampires, and more - who mixes pulp and camp into his horror like the best of ‘em. On the surface, the fact that I’ve been so traumatized by a book about a haunted IKEA knock-off feels. For weeks after I finished this one, I’d find myself staring into space just wondering about the characters and their fates and the why of it all. It’s not so much gory as existentially upsetting - the decisions Andrew and Eric are forced to grapple with are so bleak it immediately hooked its claws into my psyche. up until a group of eerie strangers appear on their doorstep, triggering a grisly confrontation and a heaping amount of “what the fuck?!” With no cell service and the closest neighbors over two miles down the road, it’s a city-dweller’s unplugged paradise. It introduces 7-year-old Wen and her fathers, Eric and Andrew, who are taking a family vacation at their remote New Hampshire cabin. That is very much the vibe of Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World, which mashes together a violent home invasion with a looming apocalypse. What more could you want in a book, honestly? ![]() Instead, it feels like an important message wrapped inside entertaining, thought-provoking nightmare upon nightmare with a scarred-for-life-flavored cherry on top. reason - into scenarios so terrifying that it doesn’t feel like a lesson being preached at you from a pulpit on high. One of my favorite things about the horror genre is how it’s able to distill core themes about our everyday lives – good vs. ![]() ![]() It’s trippy and disorienting in an A24 movie kind of way, if that’s at all your vibe.ĩ. But I’ll just say that when news that this book was being adapted into a Netflix film started floating around the internet a few years back, I decided to give it a go, and I’m so glad I did. I can’t even properly explain how very weird, and deeply, deeply unnerving this book about a couple’s trip out to the country to meet his parents is without giving away key pieces of the plot. ![]() Let’s start off light, shall we? (And hopefully, by describing this odd, freaky little book as “light,” it should give you an indication of what to expect from the rest of this list.) Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is short and weird. I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
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