The Inspiration behind Horrorstör

Writing a novel set in a haunted Swedish-style furniture store is like assembling flatpack furniture: a lot of tiny things have to come together in exactly the right way for it to work. For years, I had a job at a not-for-profit society that researched the paranormal. I mostly answered their phones and did filing, but I also had access to their archives which went back to the 19th century and contained accounts of thousands of hauntings. And what I learned is that everything is haunted. There were haunted houses, haunted bars, haunted novelty supply warehouses, haunted spas, haunted medical record filing facilities, and haunted street corners. 

 

Someone once asked Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, why he robbed banks. “That’s where all the money is!” he said. The same principle can be applied to ghosts. Why do they haunt houses? Because that’s where all the people are. Hauntings require an observer, so ghosts have tended to be reported where we are. And these days, more and more, where we are is at work.

 

I’d wanted to write an update of the haunted house novel for a long time, but nothing was coming together. Then I was chatting with my editor, Jason Rekulak, and together we came up with the idea of a haunted Swedish-style furniture store as you find in so many big towns and cities. It’s full of empty room displays, occupied by no one, and at night it’s all too easy to imagine a family of ghosts sitting around their self-assembled dining room tables, passing lime-coloured serving bowls full of ectoplasm. 

 

One of the key elements in both real and fictional hauntings is a sense of disorientation, and what’s more confusing than finding your way around a large home store? For most of us, the one place we regularly find ourselves disoriented and confused is on the showroom floor, walking in circles as we try to find those elusive antler-shaped handles we so desperately need. 

 

The other piece of the Horrorstör puzzle, was work. As we all work longer hours, with many of us holding down two jobs, and clocking more and more overtime, it’s only natural that those strange experiences we used to only have at home begin to manifest at work. That shadowy figure standing at the end of the aisle who quickly disappears when we look up, emails that arrive from a departed colleague that contain no words, that late night moment, when everyone’s gone home and we’re slogging away at yet another presentation, when we stop clacking on our keyboard and, far away down the rows of supposedly empty cubicles, we hear the sound of someone’s typing stop one second later. Ghosts go wherever we are, so why should we expect them to stay home when we head off to work?