Grady Hendrix is the author of several well-received horror/comedy hybrid novels, including My Best Friend’s Exorcism, We Sold Our Souls, and the recent The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. I first got to know him through Paperbacks from Hell, his deep dive into the glorious world of 70s and 80s paperback horror fiction, for which we share a profound love.

I have a confession, which is that, despite having been told for years that Hendrix is the real deal, Horrorstör is the first of his novels I’ve read. I’ve had it on my TBR stack for a while, and my son kept telling me how much I would love it, but there are just so many damn books in the world, and so little time. Finally, I read that Horrorstör had been optioned for a movie, so I pulled the trigger. I’m so glad I did!

Horrorstör takes place over the course of one night in an Orsk Furniture Superstore in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Orsk is patterned after Ikea, right down to the individual room settings and the nearly pathological design of the path through the store. The morning shift has been arriving to unexplained nightly damage—broken furniture, smashed glasswork, disruptions in the pristine store layout. In order to solve this riddle and get the store back on track, three store employees (and two other employees with their own agenda) stay the night to discover just what’s going on.

The novel begins as a relatively light-hearted romp. Hendrix has an easy way with humor, as he allows it to occur naturally from the characters we meet, and the situations they find themselves in. It’s not forced. He takes his time, letting us get to know, and mostly like, these people. They’re three dimensional, not stock, cardboard characters. Then darkness, and madness, descends, and let me tell you, Hendrix can write the hell out of all-out horror. Once he starts twisting the screws, shit gets real. He has a masterful sense of pacing as he puts these characters I’ve come to identify with through the wringer. This is scary stuff.

That’s the basic set-up, but it’s not what makes this such a memorable novel. See, Hendrix is either one helluva researcher, or he’s spent a lot of time in Ikea, because his attention to detail, his sense of place, the specificity he brings to the story, is what puts this book over the top. Horrorstör looks and feels like an Ikea catalog, from the shape of the book, to the illustrations that pepper the pages and become increasingly macabre the deeper you delve. He puts you in the store with such a solid, concrete reality, that when the supernatural mayhem begins twisting and shredding that reality, it’s that much more jarring. Everything about Horrorstör, every little detail in book design, adds a richness to the novel.

On a personal note, when I say Hendrix gets the details right, that extends to the Cleveland setting. As a Cleveland native and fan, I get annoyed when writers are sloppy about describing my city. Hendrix is dead on. I could hop in my car and drive to the Orsk store.

Horrorstör was published in 2014, and I’m sorry it took me this long to read it. Get it now, before the movie comes out, and be prepared to be thoroughly frightened, and thoroughly entertained.