He’s a technical writer who has, ironically, been hired to write a corporate manual for The Store. The novel’s main character, Bill Davis, has a front row seat to this hostile takeover. The Store is known for strategically setting up shop in small towns, rendering local businesses kaput, and insidiously overtaking the city government one piece at a time. In the Bible, Jericho was the site of Joshua’s great battle, and in Little’s novel it is the site of an admittedly different, but still great, confrontation. The novel follows the arrival of The Store-a Wal-Mart knockoff with far more hellfire and brimstone-in the small town of Jericho, Arizona. Films like The Final Girls or Netflix’s The Babysitter are hilarious, but watching them you’re not exactly shaking with fear.īut The Store hits both buttons at once. And while the horror-comedy is a respectable genre-one of my personal favs, in fact-the end result is generally more humorous than horrifying. Satire is not exactly known for subtly, and it is all too easy to trip and fall on your face. Satire is a tricky business, especially in the field of horror. It is both a compellingly creepy tale about evil invading and taking over a small town and a wickedly sharp satire of how corporations are (in this case, a very thinly veiled Wal-Mart) corrupting and destroying America. The Store succeeds where many other horror novels fail: at operating on two equally engaging levels at once.

And The Store is an underrated masterpiece of the genre.

That says more about me though than it does about Little, because after finally coming around to reading The Store, there is no doubt in my mind that Little is a damn fine writer. I read his novel The Walking when it came out, and half of The Town years ago, but neither novel caught my attention so much that I stuck with him.

I don’t know why I’ve avoided Bentley Little for so long.

The Store by Bentley Little