I got this softcover from Barnes and Noble, mainly because I couldn't resist the premise: a horror novel set in a contemporary-home-goods store that's part of an American chain of faux-Swedish stores modeled after IKEA. The front cover shows a typical staged room full of furniture and knick-knacks - with a ghostly figure apparently trying to escape from a picture frame. The back cover takes the same scene into even darker territory. Should be fun!

Later: I give the book points for concept, which is both amusing - a haunted big-box store - and which is carried out throughout the book in the details of catalog-based images, store-employee-guide fact sheets, motivational images, etc. The story itself is a solid horror tale of gradually-increasing weirdness, with modern notes such as the characters' attempts to call for help - they can talk to the police, but when they try to tell them how to get to the store it seems that the access roads aren't where they used to be. The more genre-savvy characters *should* have an edge, in theory, yet whatever they attempt seems to get pulled in to whatever's manipulating the area...

The gradual reveal as to what's haunting the building and why is nicely done, and yet I found the overall pacing a bit off - the story seemed more bloated than it needed to be, and might have worked better in a more concise form. That might have meant dropping a lot of the heartfelt accuracies of life as an employee in such a store, though, so perhaps it's better as it is. And I did enjoy the ways in which some of the scariest scenes shifted into humor with references to aspects of the furniture designs - familiar to anyone who's acquired a flatpack item that had to be assembled, with dubious instructions and sometimes incomplete sets of parts!

[There's a TV Tropes entry on the book.]

I left this book on a bench near the moose sculpture at around 3 or so; hope the finder enjoys it!

*** Released as part of the 2016 One Word Title release challenge. ***