Reading Rambo

There's been a lot of chatter about Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix, mainly because it looks like an IKEA catalog and that is SO COOL. Not to lick Quirk Books's boots, but I keep being completely charmed by them and their publishing decisions (also they look especially lovely today). 

They sent me a copy of this to review because I asked one of their staff members if I would like it and she was basically like "TOTES."


After being burned by things like the book Night Film and countless episodes of Scooby-Doo, I worried there'd be some "It wasn't really haunted after all!" tomfoolery happening, but REST ASSURED, the faux-IKEA in this book is haunted as shit. It just takes some time to get there.

So the main character, Amy, has a dead-end life and works at America's version of IKEA, which is called Orsk. But weeeeird stuff's been happening at Orsk overnight, so the Totally Into His Job manager makes her and another employee stay overnight to try to fi…

What could it mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?...
H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau has been relegated to campy film status like The Invisible Man, but Wells was about so much more than that. What I did not know going in were the themes he deals with -- I just knew "something about an island with messed-up animals."


What actually happens is there's a guy in a shipwreck who gets picked up by a boat with weeeeird passengers that look almost -- ALMOST -- inhuman. And there's another guy on the boat named Montgomery who's all cagey about where he and his weirdo passenger friends -- and also a llama, puma, and a bunch of rabbits -- are going. But the drunk captain of the boat HATES Montgomery and his weirdo friends, and makes him AND the shipwrecked guy get off at Mysterious Island, where an older dude with white hair meets them. GUESS WHO THAT GUY IS (hint: he's a doctor).

So Shipwrec…