Book Review: Horrorstor

Horrorstor, by Grady Hendrix is a satire on Ikea and big box retail, but it is also a very compelling horror novel.  Something has gone wrong in the Orsk store in Cleveland Ohio.  Sales are down, even though the store is always busy.  There is a strange man who keeps appearing and disappearing from the salesfloor.  There are strange smells, and stains on furniture when the store opens, that weren't there when the store closed.

  In order to figure out what is going wrong at the store, three employees agree to spend an overnight in the store to patrol and catch the culprit.  So Manger Basil; young, directionless Amy; and perky, and upbeat Ruth Anne; all settle in for a long night.  It soon becomes clear that there isn't a person responsible for the trouble at all, but a malignant evil which has existed for centuries, just waiting for an opportunity to get out.

The story itself is sound, but the book is also nicely done.  It is set up to look like the Orsk furniture catalog.  It comes complete with descriptions or Orsk furnishings, a map of the store, coupons, and a home delivery form.  So in addition to being a captivating read, it is also a well designed book.

Overall Horrorstor is a very entertaining twist on the haunted house genre.  I recommend this quick and frightening story of dedication and redemption.

Horrorstor is available new in paperback for $12.95 + tax.  Come in and grab your copy today!

Book Review: Something From the Nightside

Something From the Nightside is the first book of the 12 book Nightside series by Simon Green.  If you like your fantasy a little darker, a little weirder, and a little more British this would be an excellent series for you.

The book starts with our protagonist, John Taylor, who isn't quite human.  He is a private investigator who is forced to return to the Nightside, a sort of hidden netherworld London, where it is always 3 am and always dark.  Taylor had been living in London, away from the Nightside.  He though he had finally left it for good.  The book focuses on his quest to return a runaway child to her mother.  Along the way we meet an interesting cast of characters, all various friends and enemies of our main character.

There is Suzie Shooter, the human bounty hunter who gets her name from her trademark weapon, and makes her money in very violent ways.  There is also Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Straight Razor, also violent.   And something more than human, that cannot be killed.  There is also Alex Morrisey, the owner of Taylor's favorite bar Stangefellows, whose family has been attached to the bar for centuries, but can never leave.

One of the driving themes of this story and all the books, is Taylor's special talent for finding things, and what it allows him to do.  A theme that goes hand in hand with his abilities as a finder, is what he really is.  He is a product of a relationship between a human father and an inhuman mother.  What exactly his mother is is unknown to both Taylor and the reader.  Most creatures of the Nightside speak of her with both reverence and fear, but no one will reveal to Taylor exactly what she is or where she can be found.

I found Tales From the Nightside very entertaining.  Think of it as a cross between Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.  It's dark, mysterious, British and a bit gross.  But at all times entertaining.  The characters are well drawn, and interesting, and there are enough different types that Taylor interacts with, that it is never dull.  Beware in the Nightside.  Nothing is ever what it seems.  We have book 1 and 2 of the Nightside series available new in paperback for $7.99+ tax.

I Don't Care How Many Bats I Have Tattooed on My Person, I Still Do Not Have to Read Dracula

It's kind of a mantra.  I struggle with this deep doubt of my worth as a bookseller, because I read almost exclusively for pleasure, and almost always out of the often shunned genres of: fantasy, young adult, and graphic novels.  I seldom find other things that call to me, but there is this tiny voice that whispers that I'm a bad person for refusing to read non-fiction, or even classic literature.  So I repeat to myself that I don't have to read Dracula.  My goth card will not be revoked if I don't.

Here's the thing.  In the second year after Borders closed, I pledged to read one classic a month for the entire year.  I kicked it off with the most bookseller friendly classic of all time; Fahrenheit 451.  We booksellers love the First Amendment.  Since Fahrenheit 451 is pretty much all about the power of books and not losing them to censorship, I really couldn't think of starting any place else right?

And then I hated it.  I finished it and was pleased with the ending, and was glad that I made it all the way through the book, but it took me almost three weeks to read.  I could read six Jim Butcher novels in that time, and not feel bogged down by a sense of moral obligation to pick up a book.

I kind of imagine this is how non-readers feel all the time.  "I'm not enjoying this, but if people see me holding this, they'll think I'm some sort of savvy intellectual type."  Make no mistake, I definitely felt intellectually superior to everyone walking around with Fifty Shades of Grey (that's when this experiment took place), but I wasn't a very happy reader.

So like 90% of the population, I guiltily abandoned my New Year's Resolution.  I then spent the next 49 weeks reading 83 additional books, including nearly everything Jim Butcher has written (hence the earlier math-those were not random numbers).

So, I learned a lesson.  Classics are not really my thing.  Most of the time I feel okay about it.  I have my handful of go to non-fiction books (I love you Simon Winchester), and I have my token regular fiction book (The Bean Trees).  I also have a trove of recommendations based on the 50 hours a week I spend selling books to other people ("What are the last three books you loved," isn't just to help you find your next favorite book.  It's also to help the person who has read it already.).  But there's this voice that whispers (usually after someone gives me a scornful "oh," sometimes with accompanying eyeroll, when I answer their inquiry as to what I read), that tells me to put on my big girl pants and read some literature.  It's typically not a very positive voice, so I have decided to continue to repeat my reader mantra: "I don't care how many bats I have tattooed on my person, I do not have to read Dracula", and I am a happy reader.

A New Reason to be Afraid of the Dark

I love House of Leaves. It's a horror story with no vampires, no werewolves, no ghosts or demons, but still scary as any other book I've ever read. Even still, I am regretting my decision to pick this for my blog subject. It is one of my favorite books of all time (not to mention perfect for the Halloween season), but it is also one of the hardest to describe. It’s difficult for me to put into words an experience so psychologically horrifying or visually disturbing as reading this book. And now I have to convince you to read it without my usual crutch of being able to simply hand you the thing and watch you flip through the pages with your brow increasingly furrowing and your jaw lolling and drool running off your chin, when I exclaim with unbridled triumph and all-out-manic delight the word, “SEE?”

Anyway, that’s how it normally happens. I suppose I’ll just have to give this way a shot.

For my sake, let’s start off with the easy stuff:

1.       House of Leaves is a horror novel by Mark Danielewski.

2.       The novel is written as a documentary

3.       The documentary is based around a series of video records that may or may not exist

4.       These videos chronicle explorations of dark and physically impossible chambers that grow and move within the House

5.       The study of these videos was written by a blind man, who is now dead

6.       A young man named Johnny Truant finds this manuscript among the dead man’s things.

7.       Johnny Truant frequently interrupts the narrative with his own observations

8.       Johnny may or may not be a pathological liar and, in addition to that, he’s losing his mind.

In summary, it’s a novel written as a documentary which is written by a blind man about videos of a shape-changing House that he obviously couldn’t see, which could also have been completely fabricated to make a great premise for the blind man’s opus, which we’ll never know because he’s deceased and so  we can’t ask him, which is then edited by a complete stranger to the blind man and the project who becomes fanatically obsessed with learning the truth of the matter, but also professes in his increasingly schizophrenic tirades that he tends to lie a lot.

With me so far?

Come along, then. We’ll pick up the stragglers later.

The house of title fame belongs to a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist named Will Navidson who resides in this quaint countryside abode with his wife and two children. Everything seems just fine and dandy until  the hallway appears.

This hallway doesn’t connect two rooms. Rather, it branches off a living room wall and extends into total darkness. It is dark, featureless, and eerily cold. The general consensus is that it’s giving everyone the heebie-jeebies. So of course, Navidson busts out the camera and goes exploring. The walk from the living room entryway to the wall inside takes him five and a half minutes to complete. Sufficiently creeped-out, the family did the only sensible thing they could do: they boarded up the hole and stuck a door on it. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t help. Unable to contain his curiosity, Navidson opens the door for a peek only to find that the hallway has stretched out even farther.

Soon, they discover an entire catacomb of corridors and chambers has manifested behind the living room wall. Navidson hires a team of explorers to investigate the area. When they don’t return, he and his own team move in to rescue them. What they step into is a dark and foreboding place whose architectural make-up alters and moves while they’re inside. Where the darkness had once been utterly silent, now an otherworldly growl begins to draw nearer.

But what Navidson and his team find in the darkness isn’t a growling monster, it’s more terrifying than that. What they find in the darkness is what slowly drives poor Johnny Truant insane, it’s what we can assume made the blind man so obsessed with Navidson’s story, and what probably drove him a bit crazy, too. The madness they uncover  starts being mimicked by the book itself, with strange cross-outs, entire missing sections, incessant and disrupting footnotes, backwards print, and formatting that makes the writing near impossible to read.

Even though you’re positive you’re reading a novel and it’s fiction and you know in your noggin that the Navidson Record doesn’t exist, even though the characters in the book are themselves doubtful anything occurring is real at all, even though it makes no sense that a blind man would review a video documentary, even though there’s that ever-present Johnny Truant who has a penchant for fabricating wild, elaborate stories, what they find there in the darkness will make you keep the night light on. Even more frighteningly, you probably won’t be sure why.

And if that hasn’t convinced you, pick up the book and flip to the middle. Trust me on this one.