The Store

by Bentley Little

Book Overview

In a small Arizona town, a man counts his blessings: a loving wife, two teenage daughters, and a job that allows him to work at home. Then "The Store" announces plans to open a local outlet, which will surely finish off the small downtown shops. His concerns grow when "The Store's" builders ignore all the town's zoning laws during its construction. Then dead animals are found on "The Store's" grounds. Inside, customers are hounded by obnoxious sales...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451192192
• ISBN13: 9780451192196
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 431 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 4.4" x 6.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Should You worry about your trip to Target or Walmart? Maybe...

Before reading, I would advice readers to be familiar with the book or documentary Obedience to authority by Stanley Milgram or be familiar with the Stanford experiment SO you will completely comprehend the behaviors portrayed in the Store and in the context of an horror fiction.

What!!!

The scarier the better for me this book made my skin crawl LOVED IT !!!!

This book freaked me out!

This is still my favorite Bentley Little book. It’s one of the scariest books I’ve read because everything in it is so normal...but it isn’t. I really loved this book!

This is was my first Bentley Little book to read, I've been wanting to read his books for some time

I didn't like anything about this book. I'll certainly give his other books a go. Just this one was a bomb for me. No character building, too much jumping around, no action happening unless it just a page and then it's goes back to normal.

One of the Best Horror Stories I Have Ever Read

I love to read but hate to write. I will say this book captivated me from cover to cover. What a concept! Take ordinary people and situations and turn them into something unbelievably evil! Reminds me of a few of my other favorite authors. I don't want to ramble on about what I got out of the story as so many others have. If you're a fan of horror, read it! Then decide for yourself. If you enjoyed it, he's got lots of other great books for you to read. If you didn't like it, don't read his books. Simple huh? After all, isn't that what reading is all about?

I would like to say I didn't love it

I usually would not go for a book with such a far-fetched and weird storyline. First of all because - this is one of the only books that you really can not put down if u tried since it is very very addictive and leaves you wondering from one chapter to another. It also pretty well developed and likable characters. and 3 - I have read many horror masters from Bram to Stephen King, as great as they are, no author scares me like Bentley Little. His work is really freaky although it is weird and nearly does not make sence - like some silly nightmare we might have that makes no sence but still manages to scare you each time you remember it. - Start from the first page, and you'll be hooked. A very entertaining and creepy novel!

Hilarious

Bentley Little was an enigma to me until a few weeks ago, when I thumbed through a few of his novels at the local bookshop. Despite the name association I made with the neighbor from "The Jeffersons," the books looked interesting and I decided to take a crack at a few of them. "The Store" is the first one I decided to read and I am glad I did. What caught my eye were the somewhat cheesy cover and the hilarious description on the back cover. As I read the book, I discovered that the humor goes well beyond skin deep.What surprises me about many of the reviews here is that they miss the biggest point of the story, namely, the humor. This is a wildly funny book. I alternated between chuckles, guffaws, snickers, giggles, hoots, bellows, knee slapping, gut busting, and roaring laughter with this gem of a novel. At first, I wondered if the book is supposed to be funny. I quickly decided that it is supposed to induce laughter. What Bentley Little is writing here is black comedy and satire on an epic scale. One event after another brought me to tears. There are horrific elements here, several which are decidedly unfunny. But overall, this book is the height of amusement. You know a book is good when you laugh out loud later, at weird times and places because you're thinking about the book. You learn to ignore the stares. It's difficult to explain what is funny in a short review. It is the cumulative effect The Store has on Juniper that brings out the chortles."The Store" takes place in Juniper, Arizona. Juniper is a podunk town out in the boonies. People have to drive to Flagstaff or Phoenix to visit a mall or a discount retailer. All of that changes when The Store arrives. The Store is a national discount chain, along the lines of Wal-Mart or Kmart. About the only person in town concerned about the new store is Bill Davis, a work at home writer who has plenty of time to poke his nose into what's going on in town. Davis has problems with The Store right from the start. The Store violates town rules by destroying the environment on the construction site. Then the dead animals start showing up, along with a transient that dies on the site. Davis is horrified to discover all of this carnage and quickly discovers that The Store is getting special treatment from the city government. When The Store is finally built, even more ominous behavior begins to emerge. The Store uses its clout to run other businesses out of town. Unemployment begins to increase, as does The Store's influence in town government. The Store starts to sponsor activities in town, and they take over city services. People that are hired at the store begin to exhibit cult-like behavior. Bill is horrified when his daughter Samantha takes a job at The Store, followed by his other daughter, Shannon. Bill gets fed up with the increasingly fascist activities of The Store, and decides to confront its CEO, Newman King. The book really builds up to what should be an awesome climax. Unfortunately, the e

A fast, fun read

Little is definately a welcome change of direction from the other authors I've been reading lately. He doesn't try to be eloquent or bog his stories down with overdescription--with brick by brick architectural rundowns of every house on the block and expatiations on the area's plant-life. He just tells a scary (and thoughtful) story in a direct, fast style that doesn't seem contrived. I got through this one--at over four-hundred pages--in a single day. On average, a book of that length takes me a good four days. If that's any indication of just how good this book was, then it deserved the rating I gave it. But......even though I gave it five stars, I do have one minor complaint. For others who read this: do you remember the chess games that Bill and Street had? How Bill would always win the computer games and Street the board ones, and how that streak eventually flipped? What was the significance to that? If it was ever explained or had some pertinance to the story, I missed it. Sometimes, when writing, one toys with an idea that never really goes anywhere. That's what the rewrite is for--scrapping that kind of stuff.As for one other complaints that others have had, I LIKE an abrupt ending, in the tradition of Poe. And, while some of the stuff in the book did seem unrealistic, (like The Store getting away with selling illegal stuff,) remember, books create an alternate universe. It was realistic within the context of the story.Little's style is refreshing and I'd highly recommend this, (and his other works,) to anyone who likes horror and can take a little shock-value.

A frightening yet ghoulishly fun horror novel

I loved this book! It is a different kind of horror novel in that it takes a disturbingly typical aspect of every day life, the chain store, and turns it into a horrorfest of strange yet sometimes believable circumstances. Of course a lot of it is far-fetched but the power, the greed, the exploitive nature of these stores rings disturbingly close to home. This book is great with details and each page has something disturbing, shocking and often hilarious to keep the reader hooked. Even more it makes you think about these homogenous stores and their influence on all of us. It is a must read for those who like something a little different, a little funny and really scary.