To assist them, they’re given a rather clunky device called a FINNA, which “using quantum entanglement” helps “navigate the series of wormholes that the lost person may have wandered through”. Ava, already in a foul mood because of her recent breakup with Jules, because she’s been called in on her day off, and because she hates her soul-deadening job in the first place, now finds herself assigned to work with Jules to track down the missing granny, possibly through an entire series of alternate LitenVärlds. It seems she might have slipped through one of the shimmering wormholes that pop up so often in LitenVärld stores that they even have an ancient training video about how to handle them. And it is indeed a lost grandmother that precipitates the plot of Finna.

Cipri doesn’t use the name IKEA, of course, though the giant “LitenVärld” home furnishings store features the familiar garish blue-and-yellow design, and the prospect of losing a grandmother among the endless showrooms sounds entirely reasonable to anyone who’s spent time there. I suppose the giant retail emporium has served as a portal into shadowy realms at least since John Collier’s “Evening Primrose” almost eighty years ago, but the deliberately labyrinthine layout of IKEA stores seems almost designed for creepy stories – something that Nino Cipri enthusiastically takes advantage of in their novella Finna, which is partly a testy workplace romance and partly a surreal consumer-satire horror story.

Finna by nino cipri