I went into this looking for office/corporate horror. I suppose I got that, to a certain extent, but this turned out to be a much more artsy and experimental book than I had hoped for.

The book's gimmick is that it's written/produced using actual office stamps. As a result, each page usually only has about 1-4 short lines of text.

At the beginning, readers are told that this is being written by an office worker at the subsidiary, using only the stamps found around the office. On June 5, 2008, workers are told that there will be a power supply interruption between 8:30 AM and 8:00 PM and that they are to remain at their workstations. The doors are locked, and the phone lines are down. The power outage goes on for a good deal longer than planned, but things at the subsidiary become hellish for the women in only 24 hours, if I interpreted things correctly.

All characters were disabled in some way and were only referred to by their disabilities: the blind girl, the mute girl, the lame man, the one-eyed man, and the one-armed man. The narrator never spoke of himself in the third person, but he'd have been "the colorblind man." I got the impression that the narrator was forced to work for the subsidiary after being diagnosed with colorblindness, but the book's setup forced readers to do a lot of interpretation, so I could be wrong. For example, I disagree with those reviewers who thought that the dogs mentioned in the text were a literal pack of wild dogs running around in the building - I think it was a metaphor for the animalistic behavior of the workers.

While reading this, I was reminded of issue #6 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, "24 Hours," in which customers and employees in a diner become increasingly animalistic and brutal over the course of 24 hours. However, I felt that Gaiman did it better. Things became nasty pretty quickly in both stories, but in Gaiman's there was a solid reason for it. In The Subsidiary, the reason seemed to be "it's dark and people are scared," but that didn't work for me. In only 24 hours, the narrator was telling the deaf girl to pay for the candle he gave her with sex. After three days, the lame man captured a boy who, from the sounds of things, he periodically raped. (I assumed all instances of "girl" actually meant "woman," since the deaf girl was another employee, but the one instance of "boy" seemed to indicate an underage character, in which case the lame man was a pedophile.)

There were no mentions of any of the practicalities of trying to survive in a building where the power had been cut and the doors locked so that no one could leave - nothing about food, water, restrooms, etc. Instead, the text's entire focus was on the things the characters did to each other, which culminated in one character's death. I'm not sure what Celedón was aiming for, but it didn't work for me on any level.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

A week or so ago, I watched a South Korean horror/thriller movie called Office. It started off with one of the office workers going home, killing his whole family, and then running off somewhere. The police, looking for leads, talked to his coworkers, who all felt that he wasn't the type of man to do such a thing. The movie then focused on one of the office interns, a young woman who'd been working her butt off for 5 months, desperately hoping to be hired on as a full-time employee. The only person in the office who'd ever been nice to her was the guy who murdered his whole family. As the movie progressed, viewers got to gradually watch all the cracks appear - the abusive boss, upper-management that only cared about what news of the murders would do to the company's image, employees who were expected to devote all their time to their jobs, etc. The ending was a bit weird, and I'm still not sure if there were supposed to be supernatural aspects or not.

At any rate, I'd like recommendations of books like this: thrillers or horror in workplace settings, preferably office jobs. I'd prefer a tense/suspenseful tone over something more comedic. I've been looking for recommendation lists that might work and here's what I have so far. Feel free to say you'd second one of the recommendations on the list. I haven't read any of these books.

- The Firm by John Grisham

- The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn

- My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti

- The Subsidiary by Matias Celedon

- The Consultant by Bentley Little

As far as stuff I've actually read goes, the closest things I can think of are:

- Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix - Not quite what I was thinking of, but it's horror in a workplace, so it fits in a way.

- Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothumb - Neither horror nor a thriller. I recall it being a bit of a black comedy, but it's been years since I read it, so I could be remembering wrong.