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The Store by Bentley Little
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The Store

by Bentley Little

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Showing 1-5 of 9 (next | show all)
I find myself re-reading this book about once a year. Like other reviewers, I always find myself placing Wal-Mart in the role of the evil corporation taking over small towns. Definitely worth a read if you're a fan of the genre. ( )
  jerephil | Jan 27, 2010 |
My first Bentley Novel. I hope they get better. I found this book to be a most disturbing tale that I will not give a high review to. The premise of this story is the evil behind corporate retail. It strongly reminds me of Walmart, and being an ex-employee I can say he got that much right. He also got right what big business does to small communities, but where he went askew in my eyes is in his development of his main characters family dynamics. I'm anything but a squeamish prude, but this man made me sick. Now for the positive... my husband read this novel in 6hrs and loved it. But then again, he's a sick pig. ;)

I will edit in a respectful nod to Bentley's respectful and tasteful nod to Stephen King. I thought that was fun and classy. But that was the only thing classy about this book.

1 from me - 5 from the hubby. ( )
  Lame | May 11, 2009 |
Very inventive. The juxtaposition of horror elements with legitimate political concerns like retail incentives, inept local government, and underfunded civil services is very well-done. It strains the willing suspension of disbelief in places, and some parts seem a little too rushed to properly convey the atmosphere, but overall much better than your average mass-market horror novel. ( )
  TheBentley | Aug 18, 2008 |
October 26, 1999
The Store
Bentley Little

Been wanting to read something by this author for some time now, as I kept seeing his name on Amazon whenever browsing through the horror listings. He has approximately half a dozen books out. This one I found at Books-A-Million in Grapevine Mills the day Mickey, Sara, Jeff and I went to see The Blair Witch Project.

At first I thought it appeared suspiciously similar to Stephen King’s “Needful Things”, about an old man and a very strange store that always seems to have exactly what you want, but the synopsis on the back of the book was misleading in that. The story is about the creeping dominance of huge, faceless chain stores – like Walmart – who have taken over the retail landscape, squeezing out the small “Mom & Pops”, the independents – and all this happening without most of us really noticing or caring. The prices are better and the shopping more convenient, and in today’s rate race where most of us don’t know or care about each other, that’s all that matters.

This book isn’t full of political statements, though its characters do rail occasionally on the evils of Big Business. It’s a very simply written story of a sinister takeover that goes mostly unnoticed except by a few, and most of those few mysteriously vanish when The Store hears about their subversiveness. ( )
  victorianrose869 | Aug 4, 2008 |
Think: Scientology-run Wal-mart from Hell owned by Howard Hughes and Satan's love child! and Bentley Little reads like a mixture of Orwell, Bradbury, King and Brothers Grimm! ( )
1 vote thekoolaidmom | Feb 28, 2008 |
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Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0451192192, Mass Market Paperback)

Bentley Little is a top craftsman of the horror tale in long form. He has the ability, more unusual than you might think, to imagine 300 to 400 pages' worth of horrific incidents that add up to a long-lasting and powerfully unsettling mood. In The Store Little examines the steadily expanding influence, over all of us, of chain stores. Listen to what one character says: "A lot of these loonies ... are so worried about the federal government, and I never saw a government agency that worked worth a damn. These guys're so afraid of Big Brother and creeping totalitarianism, but our government's always seemed to me to be full of inept bunglers, not brilliant organized master planners. Hell, they couldn't even pull off a third-rate burglary. It's the corporations we have to worry about, I think. They're the ones with the money. They're the ones who can afford to hire the best and the brightest, to competently carry out their plans."

The Store builds paranoia by starting with simple descriptions of the picturesque landscape and the deceptively banal Western town that is Juniper, Arizona. Then The Store arrives. The Store razes a lovely hill to build its huge parking lot. The Store offers well-paying jobs and an astonishing variety of consumer goods. The pattern of delight and worry in the citizens, as The Store spreads its tentacles into local concerns, is believable--disturbingly so. The Store seems like any other of the familiar chains that reproduce like rabbits, invade communities, wipe out small businesses, and turn unique localities into a generic America that looks just the same from Alaska to Florida.

But what exactly goes on, when Samantha and Shannon meet with their boss in the basement of The Store? And who are the Night Managers?

This is dystopia in microcosm. This is horror fiction at its subversive best. --Fiona Webster

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:38:47 -0500)

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