Anyone who has ever worked retail can probably regale you with tales of crazy customers, unreasonable managers, and hellish working conditions. Indeed, writer Nino Cipri’s traumatic experiences working retail inspired them to create the bizarre sci-fi horror world of their LitenVerse books. The two novellas in the series, Finna (2020) and Defekt (2021), are set in an IKEA-like big-box furniture store that has a tendency to open up portals into other dimensions…
Finna centers on two LitenVärld employees, Ava and Jules, who recently broke off a romantic relationship. After the breakup, Ava changed her work schedule so that she wouldn’t have to run into Jules on the shop floor. But when “Fucking Derek” doesn’t show up for his shift, Ava is called in to work awkwardly side by side with her ex. Then things start to get really weird when a customer’s grandmother goes missing. The LitenVärld staff is informed via cringey instructional video that the maze-like structure of the store’s showrooms occasionally causes wormholes to spontaneously open up into parallel dimensions—and it’s up to the employees to retrieve any customers who unwittingly wander through the portals. When Jules recklessly volunteers for the mission, Ava can’t just sit there and let them go alone. As the two traverse increasingly strange and dangerous worlds with alternate LitenVärld stores populated by carnivorous furniture and hive-mind clones, Ava and Jules begin to rebuild a tenuous friendship in the ruins of their romance.
A companion novel that stands easily on its own, Defekt slots into the empty spaces of Finna. It tells the story of Derek, whose absence spurred the events of the previous book. Derek is the perfect employee. He studies his LitenVärld Employee Handbook religiously, practices his customer service greetings in the mirror each morning, lives in a shipping container behind the store, and cannot understand why his coworkers don’t share his eager enthusiasm for selling Swedish furniture. It’s almost like he was made for this job…. But after a strange itch in his throat leads Derek to take his very first sick day, management reassigns him to a special inventory shift, locking him in the store overnight. Derek finds himself directed to hunt down defective products—mutant toilets and skittering toy chests that seem to have developed sentience—beside a team of four strangers that seem eerily familiar. But as he sees the brutality with which LitenVärld treats its defective products, he begins to question how his beloved employer might treat defective employees…
The LitenVerse books are overflowing with doppelgangers, of multiple different types. Finna explores the idea that different versions of ourselves exist in parallel universes. These other selves share our looks and core personality traits, but may have made different choices and wound up in different circumstances. LitenVärld considers an alternate universe version of someone to be a “suitable replacement” if that person goes missing, but is it really the same? On the other hand, it may be comforting to know that there are infinite selves in infinite universes, living out a myriad of different possibilities. Defekt introduces another type of doppelganger: clones. Fundamentally different from parallel universe selves, clones are distinct individuals that happen to have been created from the same genetic material. They look similar to each other but not identical, and tend to vary drastically in personality and presentation. Derek at first views his clones through a lens of self-criticism, seeing in them all the potential that he has failed to meet—better versions of himself, with confidence, leadership skills, or unapologetic individuality. But each clone is flawed in their own way, and Derek also comes to realize that he has his own merits, on par with those he sees in his clones. In both cases, encountering a doppelganger helps the characters to learn more about their own selves.
While there are many frightening things about wormholes that spontaneously open into other universes—worlds with carnivorous furniture or malevolent hive minds, being unexpectedly dropped into open bodies of water, the possibility of getting lost and never finding your way back to your own world—the true horror of these books is capitalism and the soulless greed it engenders. LitenVärld is a callous and mercenary corporation that is fairly cavalier about the safety and wellbeing of its customers and employees alike. Safety precautions and protocols are the first thing on the chopping block when the budget gets tight, and management’s biggest concern when someone disappears through a wormhole is the paperwork they’ll have to fill out. The company takes all sorts of shortcuts when it comes to labor and production, the ethics of which are questionable at best. While these critiques are presented in an exaggerated and satirical fashion in this novel, they reflect a genuine frustration with the power that large corporations are given in our society and the soul-crushing exploitation that workers are all too vulnerable to.
If you like your surreal multiverse stories with a side of humor and anticapitalist angst, then Finna and Defekt are the books for you! You can find both books on shelves now at your favorite local retailer. Or buy them online and support The Gothic Library in the process, using this Bookshop.org affiliate link for Finna and this affiliate link for Defekt. If you’ve already read one or both of these books, let me know your thoughts in the comments!