Grady Hendrix on Horrorstör: “I’m not sure we should talk about humor and horror like they’re two separate things anymore?”
The author explains the weird (and yet oddly banal) origins of his retail horror comedy novel.
“I never set out to write horror. I really only wanted to write stories about the world I see around me.”
Horror comedy novelist Grady Hendrix is the author of Horrorstör, the only story about a haunted Scandinavian furniture store you'll ever need. The novel follows a group of employees who stay overnight at an IKEA-esque store to investigate strange acts of vandalism. That’s when it gets weird.
The 2014 horror comedy novel—written by Hendrix and illustrated by Michael Rogalski—is set in a furniture store that’s experiencing supernatural phenomena. 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…
Below, find out more about the book, and find our more from the author about his process as a horror comedy author.
Horrorstör
Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books
Categories: Ghost Suspense, Ghost Thrillers, Horror Fiction
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Reviews:
“Horrorstor is a horror story that takes place in an Ikea-like big box store. It’s blend of horror and comedy had me chuckling even as I was cringing.” (Book Thoughts From Bed)
“Horrorstör” delivers a crisp terror-tale that’s perfect for passing time between carving pumpkins and planning costumes.” (The Washington Post)
“A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living. (Kirkus)
“I loved this book, as I said, Hendrix is becoming one of my favorites. It is a perfect mix of horror, current events, with just the right touch of the insane to keep me turning page after page. Check it out, and next time you are at IKEA, remember this book.” (Grimdark)
“For a book which is mainly an excuse to figure out what would happen if you were shrink wrapped to an office chair (bad, bad things, that’s what would happen) most of the characters get at least a little development and Basil and Amy get a ton. Their development is believable and deeply satisfying (but not romantic).” (Smart Bitches Trashy Books)
“Horrorstör is a sardonic and creepy page-turner that spins the familiar against the reader, from the cycle of labour, to shopping. (Though it’s not really much of an economic treatise.) … As the story unfolds and the ghosts use stock against the characters, wares become grotesque, such as the Bodavest restraint chair, “forcing the subject into a state of total immobility.” (The Toronto Star)
“Horrorstor is a solid (if short) horror novel that does exactly what Hendrix wants it to do. There’s plenty of gore and mayhem—but at the same time the book actually has a lot more depth than that. It’s definitely worth a read for any horror fan—and for anybody who’s ever worked in ‘big box’ retail, I’d say it’s downright essential. (Dial H For Houston)
“Witty and fully aware of the topes and history of the genre Horrorstor is a clever and fully aware of itself without ever becoming Self-reverential. From the opening paragraph, which pays homage to Dawn of The Dead, Horrorstor’s narrative is filled with wonderful nods to both classic film and books. … It’s always hard to mix horror and comedy, but rather than going for the slapstick approach or the smug all-knowing approach…Hendrix stays firmly on the path of biting satire. (Ginger Nuts of Horror)
About author Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix writes horror comedy fiction (among other things). In addition to Horrorstör, his works include the “wildly entertaining” real estate horror comedy How to Sell a Haunted House; the book The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires about, well, a Southern vampire getting clubbed to death with books; the novel We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal take on the Faust legend; The Final Girl Support Group, with its clever spin on slasher movie ideas; and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, about demonic possession, friendship, exorcism, and the Eighties (it’s basically Beaches meets The Exorcist).
Hendrix also wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom in the 1970s and 1980s.
Interview with Grady Hendrix about Horrorstor
Q: Grady, we understand that you are a fan of the horror genre what with ‘Horrorstor’, ‘My Best Friends Exorcism’ and your latest offering ‘Paperbacks from Hell’—what first attracted you to the genre and also what made you want to write horror?
“In terms of primal trauma, when I was six years old I got obsessed with a book about witches and folklore I found in this house we rented, but the only stories in it were really grotesque bloody ones about torturing witches and ghosts returning from the grave hellbent on revenge. That probably warped me at an early age, but to be honest I never set out to write horror. I really only wanted to write stories about the world I see around me. Marketing departments are the ones who told me it was horror.”
—INTERVIEW: Grady Hendrix (Storgy Magazine)
Q: How did you get the odd and amazing idea to write a horror story set in a superstore, resembling a IKEA-store?
“I can’t take all the credit. My editor at Quirk is at least half to blame. For years, I worked at a non-profit society that did research on the paranormal. I mostly answered their phones and did filing, but I got access to their archives that went back to the 19th century and spent hours reading accounts of hauntings.
“I became really fascinated by haunted houses, haunted sidewalks, haunted barns, haunted novelty supply warehouses, haunted medical record filing facilities, all of it documented extensively in this archive, and I felt like there was an opportunity to do an updated haunted house story.
“I was trying to sell a different book to Quirk about a haunted house and they rejected it, but Jason Rekulak, my editor, asked me if I’d thought about doing a haunted big box retail store. We started talking and within minutes we were talking about doing a haunted Ikea.
“One of the things that I like most about the idea is that both ficitonal and real hauntings always seem to involve a sense of disorientation, of things moving subtly while you’re not looking, of a house like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House where the floorplan seems to shift and confuses you, and let’s face it: getting lost in an Ikea is not a unique experience.”
—Interview with Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstör, classical horror story set in IKEA-like superstore (Bear Books)
Q: What was it about the architecture that drew you to it?
“For me, there are really only two architectural concepts that are supposed to induce some kind of psychological state. One is the Panopticon, which is supposed to induce this sense of helplessness and control. I think it was Foucault who started talking about this idea that you’re also surveilling each other and you’re controlling yourself. I feel like—from what I’ve read—some of Bentham’s ideas wound end up going into the Auburn system, and the silent system.
“And then, there were experiments where guards would be masked, and sometimes prisoners would be masked as well to keep them from fraternizing and recognizing one another. I don’t know how long those experiments went on or if they were considered successful, but all of this stemmed from Bentham and this idea of—in architecture—of control and surveillance.
“But then, the other architecture to induce a psychological state is the labyrinth, not a maze, in which you go through and there’s an ending, but the labyrinth which is—you know, there is no wrong turn, but it’s a winding path and the design of it is to disorient you and cut you off from the world around you and to induce a state of introspection.
“In the British hedge maze concept, you wind up at some central point where you have some revelation. You see a sundial that says ‘tempus fugit’ or a reflecting ball, or a pool of water, something that’s designed to bring you to some moment of insight, or the walking labyrinths that some cathedrals have built into their floors.
“Then you get into the whole area of retail psychology. I’m sure you’ve seen the Gruen transfer, this whole idea of disorienting the consumer and cutting them off and making them suggestible so that you can have them to participate, to take the decision to buy things.
“One of the things that’s very, very common in horror fiction is the labyrinth: you have the Minotaur—classically—which is sort of the model for slasher movies. A bunch of virginal youths are dropped somewhere in the woods or somewhere disorienting in a new landscape where some kind of man monster kills them one by one, and there’s only one who can escape. But also things like The Shining, the Overlook hotel designed for the film, or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House … This idea that this key component of horror is an architecture that disorients you, that cuts your off from the world around you and brings you to this moment of introspection, but in these cases—with Hill House or The Shining—the moment of introspection you have is this moment of horror where you realize that you are the monster or you have no identity to yourself, so it was nice for me to be able to incorporate both those modes into HorrorStör – the labyrinth and the Panopticon, to greater and lesser degrees.”
—Interview with Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstör (Quirk Books, 2014) (Open Edition Journals)
Q: There’s a level amount of humor and camp in (YOUR STORIES)—so very Grady Hendrix! How do you think these elements (humor, horror, and emotion) work together to draw readers in?
“My job is to keep readers turning the page, so I’ll use anything I’ve got at my disposal, whether it’s an emotional hook, a joke, suspense, or something disgusting and horrible. That said, humor and horror are joined at the hip. You can’t have one without the other. I can’t think of a single good horror movie that isn’t funny on some level.
“Alien is as grim as it gets, but the filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of the Harry Dean Stanton/Yaphet Kotto double act. The Blair Witch Project has a really funny opening 20 minutes that sends up documentary filmmakers, and The Thing has one of the funniest lines in movie history that absolutely brings the house down every time it screens.
“I’m not sure we should talk about humor and horror like they’re two separate things anymore?”
—INTERVIEW: GRADY HENDRIX TELLS US “HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE” (Rue Morgue)
Q: Hey Grady, you have a knack for writing women. I especially enjoyed Amy from Horrorstör and Kris from We Sold Our Souls. Although these two characters are put into implausible or impossible situations, there is an element of authenticity to their reactions. Do you connect better with a female protagonist as a writer?
“All my characters need to have something that distances them from me so that I see them as a fully rounded three dimensional person rather than myself in a fiction suit. Often I’ll have a story that I just can’t crack then I’ll make the main character female and suddenly it works.
“Kris in We Sold Our Souls was originally Chris and it was my book about male anger, but then the 2016 election happened and I realized that if I wanted to have a character who had been told they didn’t matter in the slightest, it really only made sense for them to be a woman at that moment in time.”
—AN INTERVIEW WITH GRADY HENDRIX (Grimdark Magazine)
Q: Any time you can blend horror and comedy it clicks as the two genres are kissing cousins, but they can be notoriously hard to mix. Was there a focus on keeping it more of a fun tale?
“One of the things about horror and comedy is that they’re structured so similarly. I mean, it’s set up and delivery, right? Whether the delivery is a gore gag or a joke or a laugh, it’s a similar structure.
“One of the things I find really nice about horror is that I find that I get a lot of mileage out of taking things literally. Like, okay—people are trying to kill you and you’re running for help and you’re surrounded by Satanists. But in between there are these banal exchanges of dialogue because that’s just who we are. Like, ‘I’m the babysitter!’, then it’s, ‘What do you make per hour?’
“We don’t ever really know what genre we’re in in real life. I don’t know if that noise outside my door is a comedy or a horror movie, you know? Am I going to go outside and it’s someone with no pants on, drunk in my flower bed? Or is there a lunatic with a pitchfork hiding behind the tree?
“So, I feel like, with horror, I try to apply a reality principle a little bit. And if you go too far it gets goofy; if you don’t do it enough it gets overly furious and sort of edgelordy. So, really I try to walk that line. I probably err on the side of goofy more, but I’d rather do that than take it too seriously. I take it seriously, but that results in ridiculousness more often than not.”
—GRADY HENDRIX INTERVIEW (Horror DNA)
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Ten Questions with... Grady Hendrix | The Westport Library
From the Westport Library: “Bram Stoker Award-winning horror writer Grady Hendrix answers our 10 quarantine questions. Check out Grady’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires!”
Hendrix talks about his fascination with the Bari Wood novel The Tribe:
“I’m a sucker for that sort of gritty, New York City ’70s, early ’80s atmosphere. You know, the Serpico thing, Dog Day Afternoon, Fort Apache, The Bronx—even though it’s not New York, like Hill Street Blues. I just love that.
“And Barry Wood is this author who wrote this big, fat juicy novel. Lots of characters, lots of plot lines, set in New York in 1980, I believe. But it’s also about a golem that sort of goes berserk and is killing people and it’s fabulous.
“I find a lot of contemporary fiction, it’s good, but right now a lot of it’s very interior. A lot of it’s very first person. A lot of it’s about ‘one man teaching English in a small graduate department in western Tennessee.’
I want bigger. So, this satisfies my New York City in the ’70s Jones. It satisfies my bigger Jones. And it satisfies sort of my golem Jones. So, The Tribe by Bari Wood.”
More horror comedy articles on Monster Complex
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Related links
How to Sell a Haunted House to Get a Film adaptation by Grady Hendrix (List23)
Boring Book Events? Not for Grady Hendrix. (The New York Times)
Reading Pathways: Grady Hendrix (Book Riot)
Q&A With Grady Hendrix, Author of February Indie Next List Top Pick “How To Sell A Haunted House” (American Booksellers Association)
Horror author goes viral with terrifying story of his Charleston childhood home (Post and Courier)
Every Upcoming Grady Hendrix Book-To-Screen Adaptation (Game Rant)
Horror author Grady Hendrix brings a sense of humor to his terrifying work (Houston Chronicle)
Grady Hendrix: Charm and Consequences – Locus Online (Locus Magazine)
Why You Should Be Reading Grady Hendrix if You Love Horror (Horror Geek Life)
'The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires' mixes horror with humor (KMUW)
Grady Hendrix reimagines the horror movie sequel in 'Final Girl Support Group' (NPR)
Sam Raimi Producing HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE for Legendary Entertainment (GeekTyrant)
Think your house is haunted and want out? Author Grady Hendrix has ideas on how to sell it (CNBC)
