Satire Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

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Horrorstor – Grady Hendrix

October 18, 2022 / Sheree / 4 Comments

Setting aside any regards for its contents, Horrorstor gets five stars for book design, alone. Look at it! It’s formatted to look like an IKEA catalogue, complete with an order form for a copyright page and product descriptions for chapter headers. It’s honestly one of the most beautiful tomes I’ve ever had the privilege of placing on my shelves.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop gushing. Horrorstor is a 2014 horror-comedy novel by pop-culture journalist and pulp-fiction enthusiast Grady Hendrix. The concept is enough to make you laugh and shiver at the same time. Basically, it boils down to this: haunted IKEA. Freaky, right?

The story is set in Orsk, a furniture superstore clearly (but not officially, not at all) based on the Swedish conglomerate. Something is up in this shop, let me tell you: broken glass, soiled couches, strange graffiti… all of it appearing overnight, with no culprit in sight.

Amy is a cynical but hardworking Orsk employee, disillusioned by what she sees as a dead-end job but eager not to get herself fired all the same. Her boss, Basil, on the other hand has definitely drunk the Orsk Kool-Aid. He hand-picks Amy, and Ruth Anne (another Orsk employee whose work ethic more closely resembles Basil’s own), to stay with him in the store overnight and see if they can catch the vandals before a big inspection by their corporate overlords.

Trinity and Matt, two other Orsk employees, had the same idea… only they didn’t bother to get it sanctioned by the higher-ups. On one of their patrols, Amy and Ruth Anne discover Trinity and Matt also searching the store, but they’re looking for ghosts. And they’ve got cameras. They think there’s a haunting at Orsk, and if they capture video proof, they reckon they’ll get their own ghost-hunting TV show.

What could go wrong?

Back to the design for just a second: as Horrorstor gets progressively eerie, so too do the product descriptions that lead each chapter. They start out as innocuous pieces of furniture – a chair, a table, whatever – and gradually become more sinister as the Orsk haunting reveals itself. I mean, isn’t that brilliant?

Anyway, Horrorstor is surprisingly scary and gruesome. You’ll never be able to shop at IKEA again without a chill running down your spine (if you ever could before, that is). Hendrix totally nails the tone, the disconcerting sense of disorientation that overtakes us whenever we cross the threshold of one of those places. The discordant orderliness, the stale air… all of it makes for the perfect backdrop of a contemporary ghost story.

It’s silly to try and give trigger warnings for a horror novel, but what I will offer is this: if you’re claustrophobic, or squeamish about rats, sadly you might want to give Horrorstor a miss.

But it’s not all schlocky spooks and jump-scares. This story has hidden depths. Horrorstor mines the mind-fuck of consumerism and late-stage capitalism to fuel your nightmares. Hendrix draws our attention to the ways in which we are manipulated in retail environments, and the sinister truth behind the “daily grind”.

I particularly liked the epilogue. Hendrix doesn’t shy away from the psychological fall-out of a significant trauma like the one Amy experiences in Horrorstor, but he also ends our heroine’s journey on a note of agency and empowerment. It manages to be both truthful and hopeful, a fitting end to a very clever story. If you want a horror read with a well-developed female protagonist – written by a man, no less! – Horrorstor is the money.

In this age of blockbuster action flicks, I’m completely baffled that Horrorstor hasn’t been made into a film as yet. It’s one of the very few movies I’d actually consider paying to see in a cinema, to get the full effect of the superstore setting. Apparently, rights have been optioned by New Republic Pictures, but no word as yet as to when it will be coming to a theater near us.

In the meantime, I immediately want to read Horrorstor again – for the story, for the satirical winks I might’ve missed the first time around, for that brilliant book design that I can’t stop banging on about. I also have an equal and competing compulsion to read everything else Hendrix has ever written. I definitely highly recommend this one, and stay tuned for my thoughts on the others.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Horrorstor:

“The scares are good, but the real horror of our millennial/Gen Z job markets in a service economy was why I kept reading. The grind of our corporate jobs paralleled the ghostly villain’s torturous motivations nicely. In short, a delightful read during these soulless times.” – Michelle
“This hits me hard in the part of my soul that retail work bruised. The opening act is quite funny, especially if you’ve worked in a hellscape like this.” – Danny
“Must have worked at Ikea.” – Kindle Customer
“I just anticipated more humorous anxiety and such, and what I received was gore and brutality and ungodly depressing ideas.” – Miri F

Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen

August 3, 2021 / Sheree / 4 Comments

Northanger Abbey occupies a strange place in the Austen oeuvre. It was the first of her major works to be completed in full (1803), but it wasn’t published until after her death (1817). The first half of the story is a comedy of manners, the second is a satirical spin on the Gothic novel. Her heroine is plain and annoying, but still wins the love of the hero in the end. If the Austen novels were a family, Northanger Abbey would be the weird cousin who never says anything in the group chat.

It would seem that, in writing Northanger Abbey, Austen took her frustration with the tropes of Gothic novels (the shrinking violet heroines, the spooky haunted houses, etc.) and turned it into a story of her own. The Introduction to my edition cites “Austen’s deep-seated dislike of pretension… [and] the absurdities of contemporary literature” as sources of inspiration as well. Basically, Austen wanted to send-up the schlocky novels of her day – something like My Best Friend’s Exorcism would be today’s equivalent.

So, instead of a beautiful young woman who faints at a whiff of excitement, Austen chose for her heroine Catherine Morland, a particularly-naive and over-eager bookworm. She’s a middle-class middle child (of ten!), undistinguished and generally unremarkable. If I had to summarise the central thesis of Northanger Abbey‘s opening chapter, it would be: “This bitch! I mean, she tries, but damn.”

The narrator tells us directly that Catherine is “not really” a heroine. That’s another thing: the narrator’s position in Northanger Abbey is unlike any of the others I’ve read so far of Austen. It’s third-person in the sense that the story is told from an outside perspective, not by one of the characters involved, but at the same time it’s not an omniscient or fly-on-the-wall viewpoint, either. The narrator – slash Austen herself – makes little asides to the reader throughout, offering her own commentary and insights into what’s going on and what the reader should make of it all.

The “inciting incident” is Catherine’s invitation to join some family friends on a sojourn to Bath. Of course, she accepts, and while she’s staying with them, she befriends the world’s most Extra supporting character, Isabella. She’s all “oh, you simply MUST come for a walk with me, or I will DIE, I will be DECEASED, for you are my BEST FRIEND IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD and without YOU I would meet an UNTIMELY DEATH!”, on every damn page. Still, Catherine doesn’t seem to find her as exhausting as I did; she joins Isabella at balls, at the theater, at the baths, and so on.

Shortly thereafter, Catherine also meets Henry Tilney – our leading man. He’s not as dashing or charismatic as other Austen heroes, but he’s got his own kind of charm. The blurb for Northanger Abbey described him as “irresistible but unsentimental”, which is bang on. Catherine immediately falls head-over-heels in love with him – even goes so far as to befriend his sister Eleanor, in an effort to get closer to him – but he seems just mildly entertained by her (well, until the happily-ever-after).

You know who’s more-than-mildly entertained by Catherine? John Thorpe, Isabella’s brother. He’s crude and gross and would definitely have sent Catherine dick pics if he’d had the technology. He never shuts up, either. Catherine doesn’t want a bar of him, but ends up kind-of accidentally stringing him along, in an effort not to hurt his or Isabella’s feelings. Whoops.

Catherine’s own brother, James, joins them in Bath for a bit, and decides he’s in love with Isabella. She’s keen on him too, and accepts his proposal of marriage… only to come down with a ghastly case of cold feet, coincidentally around the same time as she finds out he’s not rich. She starts trying to flirt her way into a more fruitful marriage, but by the end of Northanger Abbey she gets her comeuppance and James gets away scot-free.

Once the party’s over in Bath, Eleanor invites her new friend Catherine to come and stay with her and her brother (Henry, the hottie, remember?) at their place, the titular Northanger Abbey. Catherine, having read a lot of Gothic novels, expects a spooky haunted house filled with ghosts of long-ago traumas and whatnot. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort. She stays there safe and happy as a welcome and beloved houseguest, until Eleanor and Henry’s father boots her.

That’s very bad news for Catherine, given her plan to seduce Henry and marry him and love him forevermore. Turns out, his father had had the same idea, which is why she was invited to the abbey in the first place, only Daddy thought his future daughter-in-law was wealthy. When a (scorned) John Thorpe told him she was practically a pauper, he quickly tried to pull up the seeds he had sown.

Henry’s not having a bar of that. He flips Daddy the bird, and rides like the wind to Catherine’s side, to tell her that he does love her after all (rich or no) and they’ll be married (with Daddy’s approval or no). Oh, and Eleanor manages to marry rich, too, which goes quite some way to assuaging Daddy’s concerns. Badabing, badaboom, there’s your happy ending!

So, as far as Austen novels go, Northanger Abbey is more bold and bawdy than some of her more-renowned offerings. While it hits a lot of the same notes as your Emmas and your Pride And Prejudices, it hits them a lot harder, and holds the pedal down for good measure. Take, for instance, the very obvious moral position with regards to literacy: all of the “good” characters of Northanger Abbey love books and talk about them at length, while all of the “bad” characters turn their noses up at them. I wonder what Austen was getting at with that, hmm?

(I feel I should also mention – though it was hard to work out where, so this will have to do! – that there are a couple of instances of blatant anti-Semitism, which I found really jarring, having not encountered that particular type of antiquated nastiness in Austen’s work previously. Just a heads up!)

I think I preferred the subtlety of Austen’s later work, but there’s something to be said for the explicit humour of Northanger Abbey – her other works made me nod appreciatively, while this one made me literally lol. I suppose it depends what you’re in the mood for as to which side you come down on. Still, I found this a cracking good read, and any Austen fan worth their salt should give it a go.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Northanger Abbey:

“I think she’s just freaking herself out.” – Molly Koeneman (she / her)
“Jane Austen is a very proficient writer indeed.” – revrich333
“This book was like purposefully watching a terrible documentary to help you fall asleep. Every time I picked this book up I fell asleep. This is not a book I would recommend unless you need sleep.” – Andrea
“Not really a book about a heroine. No heroine here just a girl that lucks up marrying the man she liked. Boring.” – KTWeed
“it was okay I guess, I liked the wishbone version better” – toyherb

Death At Intervals - Jose Saramago - Keeping Up With The Penguins

Death At Intervals – José Saramago

May 18, 2021 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Here we have yet another book I came to via the wonderful The To Read List Podcast: Death At Intervals (or, in the U.S., Death With Interruptions). Aside from their recommendation, it was the premise that had me hooked. In an unnamed country, on January 1 of a brand new year, death just… stops. “New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities,” the narrator explains on page one. Death is on strike. Come on, Keeper Upperers! Tell me that doesn’t pique your curiosity!

People who are unwell or injured neither improve or deteriorate – they simply don’t die. Initially, the population is dancing in the streets. I mean, it sounds like great news, right? No death! Woohoo! But of course, before long, some unanticipated consequences take the shine off the apple. Undertakers and funeral directors face bankruptcy. Religion has to take a new approach. A black market emerges, a “maphia” (spelled that way to avoid confusion with the traditional mafia) who will smuggle the elderly across the border where they can “expire” naturally. All of the outcomes are logical, once Saramago lays them out for you, but they’re definitely not the first ones that spring to mind when you hear “eternal life”.

Although Death At Intervals isn’t a comedy per se, I found it hilarious how quickly the “disappearance of death” became a bureaucratic and administrative nightmare. Saramago dedicates a lot of time to pondering: what’s to become of all the life insurance policies? Would legislating the need for pet funerals save the floundering funeral industry? He also interrogates what this situation would mean on the household level. After all, if hospitals are overwhelmed with terminally ill people who won’t die, the logical next step is that they’d be sent home to their families. What’s to become of them? Can we just stick Grandpa in the attic until death starts up again? (That’s where the aforementioned “maphia” come in, angels of death as it were, offering a solution to families who can’t bear the financial and emotional burden of caring for the nearly-dead indefinitely).

Saramago also delves briefly(ish) into the philosophy of linguistics. See, the “disappearance of death” really throws all the philosophers into a post-modern tizzy.

“It seems you don’t understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you’ll never know what things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them…”
Death At Intervals (Page 64)

In the second half of Death At Intervals, we transition from treating death (or the absence of it) as a phenomenon, and she (yes, she) becomes an actual, anthropomorphised character. She decides to get back to work (“The seven months that death’s unilateral truce had lasted produced a waiting list of more than sixty thousand people on the point of death,”, page 98) and she also decides to try something new: sending letters to the soon-to-be deceased, warning them of what’s to come. She also announces this new development in a letter written to the media, and then chastises them when they correct her spelling and punctuation.

The final twist comes in the form of one of her you’re-going-to-die-soon letters that is mysteriously returned. An otherwise-unremarkable cellist, against all odds, appears to have defied his mortal fate. This drives “death” up the wall, and she devotes all of her energies to unraveling the mystery of why this man simply won’t die.

Saramago wrote Death At Intervals in his native Portuguese (original title: As Intermitências da Morte) and it was first published in 2005. This edition was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa (#NameTheTranslator!) and published three years later. Although it’s a short book, just a couple hundred pages, it reads like a far longer one, mostly due to the fact that… well, I hesitate to say this about a Nobel Laureate, but here goes: Saramago writes weird. There are almost no paragraph breaks, not even for dialogue. Oh heavens, the dialogue – not only does he not use inverted commas, he doesn’t even break the sentence! You’ve got to read each page a couple of times to make sure you’re really clear on who’s saying what to whom. Apparently, this is Saramago’s “thing” (eschewing the agreed-upon rules of grammar and punctuation), and that’s almost enough to put me off trying any of his other books.

Still, if you can grit your teeth and put your grammar-pedantry aside, Death At Intervals is a really interesting book. It’s a modern satire dressed up as magical realism. It might force you to confront all kinds of heavy questions you weren’t expecting – could humanity exist without mortality? what about religion or philosophy? not to mention what it says about euthanasia! – but Saramago manages to keep it fun.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Death At Intervals:

“Having a hard time reading this book. It’s implausible of course but dry and uninteresting” – sheri
“interesting look on life and death. i enjoy all of Jose Saramago’s take on life.” – Lauren
“Wonderful author, great story, too bad he has passed away.” – hdf

Thank You For Smoking – Christopher Buckley

April 13, 2021 / Sheree / 0 Comments

One of my favourite movies of all time is Thank You For Smoking (2005). It follows Nick Naylor, chief spokesperson for a major tobacco lobby, as he tries to convince the world that cigarettes won’t kill you (or, if they do, at least you’ll die with liberty). The thing is, I didn’t even realise it was a book, the 1994 novel Thank You For Smoking, until I scored this copy for $4.99 in a remainder book shop while I was waiting for a train. How basic of me!

Cards on the table: I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with cigarettes for too many years. At the time of reading Thank You For Smoking, it was (mostly) off, and I was hoping this would be the book to help me kick the cancer sticks for good. It’s basically the anti-West Wing: a biting satirical caricature of Washington politics, corporate greed, media spin, and Hollywood bullshit.

The opening line sets the tone:

“Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”
Thank You For Smoking (Page 3)

As in the movie, Nick is a cigarette company flack, and a pretty damn good one (despite his boss’s suspicions otherwise). He’s a scoundrel, through and through, out for chicks and cash and cigarettes – usually in that order, but not always. His offices are just a few blocks from the White House, and he glad-hands with all the bigwigs in town (when he’s not being flown cross-country in his boss’s private jet). He loves his job, and he’ll defend cigarettes passionately to anyone who’ll listen, but deep down he knows he’s only doing it to pay the mortgage. That’s how he sleeps at night.

The supporting players are Nick’s M.O.D. Squad, the friends-cum-support-group whose self-designated moniker stands for Merchants Of Death. Together, they represent the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries, and more than one argument breaks out over whose product is the most deadly. All of the lobby groups in Thank You For Smoking have knee-slappingly ironic names and acronyms: the Moderation Council for booze, the Society For The Humane Treatment of Calves for veal, and so on.

Nick’s opposition are the congressmen (the very few of them not on the take) and public health advocates who hold him – and Big Tobacco, by extension – responsible for 1,200 deaths a day. They’ve got righteousness on their side, but it’s no match for Nick’s quick wit and doublespeak. In fact, Nick is so effective in his role that he becomes the target of anti-tobacco terrorists, who paper him with nicotine patches in a showy effort to bump him off. Nick survives, but he’s left with a terrible and apparently life-long distaste for cigarettes – a significant handicap in his line of work. Plus, the FBI suspects that he faked the whole thing to garner sympathy.

Despite his provocative rhetoric on Oprah, Nick knows he’s just plugging holes. The tide is turning against cigarettes. His boss, ever-skeptical of Nick’s media strategy, intimates that he’s one strike away from getting the sack – and that’s before he realises Nick is sleeping with an attractive young reporter who has promised him a favourable profile. Nick’s Hail Mary offering is to fly to Los Angeles and make a deal that would see movie stars smoking on the big screen (and not just the villains and the crazies). After all, product placement works for beer and popcorn, why not cigarettes?

Yes, Thank You For Smoking is funny and fast-paced and just a little farcical. It’s a thoroughly entertaining read. The thing is, reading it reaffirmed all the arguments I’ve ever heard in favour of – not quitting smoking, don’t be ridiculous – not watching the movie before you’ve read the book (or, at least, not reading the book of a movie you’ve enjoyed). I just kept picturing scenes from the (remarkably faithful, it must be said) movie version the whole way through. The laughs just weren’t quite as hearty coming from the page. Thank You For Smoking is a book I probably would have loved-loved-loved otherwise. As it stands, it was just pretty good. I’d recommend it for anyone who has a taste for political satire and a dark sense of humour.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Thank You For Smoking:

“Good plot, well told with excellent humor and all loose ends tied up expertly. Just the right length and stopped well in time before it got tedious.” – Kindle Customer
“Had to buy this book for a class. I like that it was hard back but when I received the book it had a unique smell to it and I had to leave it outside for a few days to air it out.” – Glen
“This was a gift and I didn’t read it. However, I do like Christopher Buckley’s writing and knowing this I’m sure it was great for the intended two smokers.” – Carole Stevens

My Sister The Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

September 1, 2020 / Sheree / 4 Comments

As much as we all love a bit of mystery and intrigue, sometimes it’s nice to read a book with the premise laid out completely in the title. My Sister The Serial Killer gives you exactly what it says on the tin: the story of Korede and her sister, Ayoola, who has the unfortunate habit of killing her boyfriends.

I first encountered Oyinkan Braithwaite at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (she’s lovely, by the way, and she had a queue out the door for book signings after her session). It’s hard to imagine that such an astonishingly dark and laughably twisted plot came out of the mind of such a delightful creature. I’m sure her Google search history must’ve got her on a watch-list somewhere…

But, to the story: as I said, Ayoola keeps killing her boyfriends, and it’s up to Korede to clean up the mess. Korede is literally the person Ayoola calls to help her hide a body (c’mon, we’ve all got one). The story begins with Korede cleaning up the blood spatters of the third man that Ayoola has “dispatched”, and immediately you get the sense that this situation can’t continue indefinitely.

Even aside from the serial murders, Korede and Ayoola have a strange relationship – in no small part due to their fact that their father was horribly cruel and extremely dodgy (in fact, the knife Ayoola uses to off her suitors once belonged to him, a deftly crafted metaphor for the inheritance of violence). Korede feels responsible for her sister, but simultaneously suffers from a bit of an inferiority complex. She’s the “homely” one, while Ayoola is unequivocally the “beautiful” one, with all of the privilege and preference that beauty entails.

The plot boils over when a love triangle forms: Ayoola sets her sights on the handsome and charismatic doctor that Korede has loved from afar for months. Sibling loyalty can only go so far, after all. This forces Korede into the small gap between the proverbial rock and hard place: should she keep her sister’s secrets, or divulge them to the man she loves (possibly saving his life)?

My Sister The Serial Killer thus cleverly mixes crime, romance, and family saga. It’s definitely not a thriller, in the sense that it focuses far more on the sisters’ relationship – and what happens to it under strain – than it does any cat-and-mouse games with detectives. It’s also set in Lagos, with a remarkably strong sense of location and culture that we might more commonly associate with “place writing” (and a “place” that’s sadly not often encountered by Anglophone readers, to boot).

The story unfolds in short, punchy chapters. The family backstory – abusive father, complex mother – is revealed incrementally, in a way that naturally parallels and informs the rollercoaster of the love triangle and the will-she-or-won’t-she (kill again). I must say, I thought My Sister The Serial Killer would be more light-hearted in tone – or, at least, more morbidly humorous. Braithwaite focuses more on moral responsibility and culpability than I expected. There were few laughs, and more “wait, what would I do in that situation?” dilemmas. Is Ayoola empowered, or simply sociopathic? Is Korede doing the right thing by covering up her crimes, or is she enabling a murderer? Is she righteously loyal, or simply blinded by the affection of shared experience?

But, I suppose, I can hardly complain that my funny bone wasn’t tickled when it was such a pleasure to spend time with such complex and intriguing characters. The novel’s conclusion was satisfying without being too “neat”. Braithwaite demonstrates a talent for writing far beyond her years and experience. I look forward to seeing what she comes out with next (“My Brother, The Money Launderer”, perhaps? “My Mother, The Armed Robber”?)

My favourite Amazon reviews of My Sister The Serial Killer:

“I love this story. This is the first book I’ve bought since scholastic book fairs were a thing for me.” – Lauryn
“I don’t understand why I’m meant to care about an unapologetic murderer and her accomplice sister???? Also if I had a sister I feel like my cap would be covering up one murder for her. After that homegirl is on her own. By three I’d probably call the police myself because, you know, maybe my sister needs to work through some stuff (in prison) if she’s killing this many people?” – Miss Print
“Hilarious! I have two younger sisters and one torments the other with… well, not covering for murder, but other things.” – Mason J Blacher