An Anger Bigger than the World: Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör and the Specter of Discipline

(This piece contains spoilers for 2014’s Horrorstör. You’ve been warned.)

The paperback cover of Horrorstör (2014, Quirk)

Recently, I downloaded the “Libby” application on my phone – it’s a free service that allows people who have library cards to temporarily download ebooks and audiobooks. The first one I listened to was Grady Hendrix’s comedy-horror novel Horrorstör, which turned out to be deeper and more complicated than I had originally anticipated.

I’m generally not a fan of mixing comedy and horror. Part of this is the fact that horror can be thought of as “comedy without the punchline” – mixing the two can have the disastrous effect of collapsing the horror into the comedy, turning something that can edge into tragedy and drama into a mere farce. I’m delighted to say that Horrorstör doesn’t do that: the comedy is found in the perspectives and reactions of the characters instead of the absurdity of events that surround them. It achieves its goal by placing a comic perspective within the context of horrific events.

The setting of the store is an off-brand IKEA, ORSK, located in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. It follows five employees who stay overnight at the store in an attempt to catch a vandal: Amy, the deadbeat main character; Basil, the floor manager; Ruth Anne, a spinster and life-long retail employee; Trinity, a paranormal enthusiast who puts together the displays; and Matt, a skeptic who wants to have a relationship with Trinity.

ORSK is a parody of IKEA, and as you can see, despite being a store, it attempts to express its commercial intent in the grammar of the home.

Trinity and Matt figure that, since ghosts haunt houses where something bad happened, they may also haunt ORSK, because it has all of the physical qualities of a house, looped and expanded and repeated, blown up from an enclosed space into an open one. In the terminology that we have been developing on this website, ORSK is syntactically a house but paradigmatically a big box store – it takes the form of one to serve the ends of the other.

Things go awry when it turns out that Trinity is correct – there is something paranormal afoot. ORSK is built on the site of a 19th century prison, the Beehive, which was a panopticon-style prison that is described by one character as a “mill for the manufacture of lunatics.” The warden character, Josiah Worth, is a believable pastiche of H.H. Holmes, John Harvey Kellogg, and any number of other 19th-century reformers.

As the night wears on, the five characters are put through the wringer, haunted and hunted by Worth and his “Penitents” – prisoners who have become wholly subservient to him through soul-breaking torture, – and respond in ways that seem familiar to those who have worked retail. Namely, the manager, Basil, achieves some small modicum of success by treating the rampaging ghosts as if they are unruly customers.

The thinkers that inform this piece — Michel Foucault (left) and Gilles Deleuze (right)

In addition to that piece written by Edgar, another text that comes to mind for me is Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control” (one of the more accessible texts by Deleuze, who was notoriously deep into that French-Academic style, and written in reference to Michel Foucault’s work on prisons.) Namely, the plot can be boiled down into a traumatic re-eruption of a horrifying Disciplinary logic (the Beehive, a prison) within a space of Controlling logic (ORSK, a retail establishment.) Part of why the characters survive the brutality of the Beehive is that they come from a context that has a more sophisticated logic of managing people.

Okay, real quick: Foucault summarizes two types of society in his work. The first is the “Society of Sovereignty” where the body politic and the body of the sovereign are conceived of as the same thing, and punishment is carried out as revenge for causing injury to the body of the sovereign. The second is the “Society of Discipline” where everyone has a share of responsibility for the body politic, but only through a paranoiac insistence on management is it maintained: people are enclosed in schools, in barracks, in factories, in clinics, and in prisons, and are generally left alone insofar as they display discipline. Those who fail to display discipline (a quality) are then disciplined (a process,) through punishment. Societies of Discipline function through monitoring from on-high and use violence to correct errors.

Gilles Deleuze extended this and proposed a third type, which we are in now (he wrote this decades ago, at the cusp of it.) This is the “Society of Control”, where enclosure is replaced by openness. No longer are people tested for discipline and corrected through pain: now people are expected to display self-monitor and display control. Testing is a relic, replaced by continuing education. Physical punishment is a relic, replaced by coercive distribution of resources. You are free to go wherever you want, but we built this superhighway for you to make it so much easier to get where you need* to go.

(*: “need” as in “to serve our will.”)

The design of Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon — the ultimate expression of the society of discipline.

In Horrorstör, the characters are subjected to an invasion by the logic of a society of discipline into their carefully crafted society of control – and for a time it wins, the lights are shut off, and the “bright and shining path” which guided them through the store previously, as peristaltic action would guide them through the intestines of some mammoth beast, is switched off and they are enclosed. Each of the characters is trapped and enclosed in some way in the course of the story – whether in a cell within the prison, inside the walls, on a treadmill, or strapped to a chair.

The bit about the chair is especially interesting to me. Amy goes through a typology of jobs early on, which essentially boils down to “standing = hourly, bad; sitting = salaried, good” but it’s very on-the-nose that sitting in a chair for an extended period is the disciplinary treatment that she is subjected to and which causes her such agony. It is a hallmark of societies of control to use the carrot more than the stick, and the story seems to be suggesting here that the carrot is just another kind of stick – the reward that you long for is often the very thing that will make your life miserable later on. Your desires mislead you, because they can be gamed to make you do what you need* to do.

(*: what you’ve been told you need to do.)

The superhighway, the ultimate expression of the Society of Control (image taken from Ciylab, ultimately from Reuters/China)

In the end, though, the Logic of Discipline is shown to have a weak point in the form of the Warden: by convincing the Penitents to carry him off and torture him, there is a space opened up that allows Basil and Amy to escape the store with their lives. The Society of Discipline breaks down, and the store begins to flood, water having been used to destroy the prison which haunts the store. Like in a Society of Control, Basil and Amy are free to go wherever they want in the store, after they break free. It’s simply that the current is much bigger and stronger than them and it’s flowing one particular way.

The ghostly tormentors, who desire to “correct” the characters are replaced here by a flow of water carrying a horde of terrified, hungry rats, which will drown and attack the characters out of reflexive self-preservation – an image that brought to mind the rats in 1984’s room 101 (enclosed, forced to eat through someone’s stomach through fire and heat. Avatars of the destructive power of Discipline. These rats are unenclosed, and motivated through water and cold. They are avatars of the destructive power of Control.)

Finally, the characters break out, and are caught in a traumatic loop after the ORSK supervisory structure attempts to silence them with the offer of a cushy desk job far away, and proceeds to behave hypocritically about their three dead or missing coworkers. The Cuyahoga ORSK is closed down and replaced with a store that carries goods for expecting parents and their infants (I am reminded here of the issues of childishness and infantilization I brought up previously, but I’m not going to derail myself completely just yet.) She finds that Basil has been hired on as well, and they’ve both brought supplies to try to free their former coworkers.

While the explicit villain of the story is Warden Worth, there is another malevolent force discussed: the store itself, which doesn’t work by applying torturous “cures” to the body, but by wriggling into the mind of the people within it, encouraging compliance and complacency. It doesn’t need to torture them physically, it can just encourage them to do what it wants. When I read (okay, listened to) the book, I read the store and the prison as being two versions of the same thing, fundamentally different in their expression, but identical beneath the surface (same paradigm, different syntax.) Both want ownership of the people within them. One operates through excruciating discipline, one operates through subtle control. In the end, the text proposes that solidarity in the face of either or both logical systems is the only acceptable response.

I understand that the novel has been optioned for a movie, and Hendrix is attached as screenwriter – I don’t know if these particular themes will survive the transfer from page to screen, but I’m interested to see how it turns out.

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