Book Review
Title: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix
Genre: Horror
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Last year I read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and I was disappointed by it, I have been recommended Horrorstor a lot so I decided to give it a go. If it doesn’t work for me then the next book I try will be the last chance I will be giving Grady Hendrix as an author before I write them off. All I knew about Horrorstor before getting into it was that it takes place in the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio and has a haunted house theme to it. We are introduced to Amy who almost a year ago transferred to this store but today things start going wrong from the second the employees arrive. She is quickly taken aside by her manager, Basil, who seems to have it out for her along with another employee, Ruth Anne. Amy believes Basil is going to fire her but he offers them an extra shift that night, it seems there has been vandalism on the store of the past few weeks and the security cameras haven’t picked up anything. Basil, Ruth Anne and Amy will stay in the store overnight hoping to catch the person or people responsible for vandalism before people from head office arrive the following day. He agrees to pay them more money at the end of the shift and also agree to approve Amy’s transfer back to her previous store so she and Ruth Anne agree to the extra shift and I have a feeling things might only get creepier from here.
By the time their investigation shift begins Amy is already angry at Basil since he brings up the fact she failed the test to do his job which is so easy that around 80% of the people that take it pass. It seems that Amy and Basil come from similar background but had different reactions to them which might explains the animosity between them. Basil is caring for his little sister and works hard to look after her while all Amy could think of doing was escaping the trailer park she grew up in and go to college but her mother getting married but a spanner in the works and meant Amy couldn’t afford college with a scholarship she was no longer eligible for and ended working in retail. Amy is also dealing with her roommates wanting to kick her out because she is behind on the rent. Amy immediately notices new graffiti in the bathroom that wasn’t there before and they seem to be names and ages which she finds creepy. As she and Ruth Anne patrol the showroom they spot rats and hear strange noises until they discover two more employees hiding out, Matt and Trinity. They are both there because they believe the store is haunted and they want to prove it in order to become famous but now they are five people roaming the store but Basil is the only one alone.
Things get creepier when Matt and Trinity rope Amy and Ruth Anne into helping to set our their equipment for their ghost hunting mission. Amy gets stuck with Matt and she realises that he doesn’t believe in ghosts he is only doing this to impress Trinity and complete his plan of getting out of Ohio altogether. However, they soon find themselves walking in circles and at first they believe it is because they are getting distracted by talking but after the end up looping themselves three time and each time missing their destination of the kitchen section, Matt realises something is wrong. He checks the camera and realises it is showing them the kitchen area which they aren’t seeing in front of them. He theorizes that either it is paranormal activity that is changing their perception, it could be the electromagnetic fields changing their perception or they are both going mad. By the time they get back to Trinity and Ruth Anne both are freaked out and Trinity instantly takes Matt back there it see if it happens again while Ruth Anne and Amy head back to the break room to re-join Basil.
Basil knows Matt and Trinity are there and while he is telling them off Trinity announces she saw a ghost. After reviewing the camera footage, Amy realises it was the same strange man she saw in the store that morning and they begin hunting him down. They eventually find him hiding under a bed and he isn’t a ghost but a homeless man using the store as a place to sleep while he gets himself sorted out. The group votes on whether or not they call the police on Carl and they decide not to but Amy had already phoned them. Basil decides he will wait outside for the police and send them away before tossing Carl out and resuming their watch over the store for Corporate the next morning. Trinity decides after Basil leaves that she wants to hold a seance as the other creepy things happening Carl isn’t responsible for and the others decide to humour her. Initially everything is fun and silliness but pretty soon it seems like Trinity is possessed by something and they try to remove their handcuffs to helps her when she vomits up a white liquid that makes its way into Carl’s body possessing him and it begins to speak. The spirit seems to be the warden of the old prison that stood on the land before the store centuries before and he wants to whip the employees into shape the way he did in his time and he speaks to all of them before slitting Carl’s throat. Basil chooses this moment to return and now they have a dead homeless man on their hands which they have to deal with before their bosses arrive in less than five hours but they also have an enraged spirit on their hands. The graffiti also makes sense now as they are the names of the prisoners and how long they were confined to the prison which the warden called the Beehive.
Things continue to increase in the creep factor as Carl’s supposedly dead body begins moving. Carl leads the other to a corridor that shouldn’t exist because it is the outer wall of the store and they begin to head down it together. At the bottom Basil checks around the corner and sees something that causes him to lead the others back into the store but Amy is captured in the darkness. She is tied to a chair by Carl, now being fully controlled by the Warden and he wants to treat Amy. The treatment which is essentially brainwashing begins to work on Amy until she is found and freed by Basil but the spirits of the inmates have them trapped and cornered. Basil takes the leadership role and decides to approach and confront the spirits which probably isn’t a good idea but he does it because he can’t carry Amy and this is the only way he can fulfil his role of protecting his employees even if it is from undead spirits of brainwashed prison inmates. This actually made me like Basil for the first time in the novel as he comes off as quite cold at first but he really does have their best interests as heart and he is proving it.
Basil is attacked and taken away by the spirits while Amy hides, afterwards she manages to escape from the store and make it to her car but she is stopped from escaping completely by the thought of the people she is leaving behind. Trinity and Basil are both injured and she doesn’t have a clue where Matt is as he was going after a ghost version of Trinity and she doesn’t know where Ruth Anne but she heard her screams. Amy makes the decision to return to the store and rescue her friends as she won’t leave them to that fate. Upon returning she heads to the break room where she finds Ruth Anne hiding and directs her to the hole from before. She sees Ruth Anne is injured and tries to get her out but the spirits come for her and Amy isn’t strong enough to pull her out alone and she believes that Ruth Anne is dead when they frag her back down. Amy knows she has to go back into the Beehive and there is finds Basil and rescues him. She gets him to focus on the present as the store is going to try and trick them by talking about his little sister’s birthday which is coming up. They get back onto the shop floor and find Matt’s supplies and get a flashlight but the spirits are descending on them and Amy doesn’t know what to do when confronted with the Warden again.
The final section of the novel was great and disappointing at the same time. While Basil and Amy manages to escape from the store, Matt, Trinity and Ruth Anne are lost and their bodies are never recovered. Basil throws himself into another job despite the offer of a corporate position and Amy descends into a deep depression. That is until she learns that Planet Baby is being opened on the site of the Orsk store and she applies for a job which she gets. After her first shift she turns up that night intending to descend into the Beehive again to find her friends and get them out and Basil is there too with the same idea. Despite everything that happened they decide to work together to figure out the mystery of the Beehive and find their friend. But that is where the novel ends, for me it felt like a cliff-hanger for a sequel rather than a standalone. As a standalone novel it feels disappointing because there isn’t really any resolution for the characters but if it was a duology it would be amazing as in a sequel we could see Amy and Basil really take on the Beehive to rescue their friends. Overall, I am coming to realise that Hendrix’s writing is amazing and his stories are engaging but his ending absolutely suck which leaves the reader feeling very disappointing.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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