Just from the cover, you would think that The Mall, which was first published in 1983, was a horror novel about a bunch of shoppers getting trapped by a collection of angry spirits whose slumber was disturbed by the titular building being constructed on an ancient burial ground.
Or you might think that The Mall was a sci-fi story in the style of Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall, in which The Mall of the Future turned on shoppers and refused to let them escape while a bunch of robots struck a blow for machine rights everywhere.
That’s certainly what I thought when I came across this book and spent a few minutes starting at the cover at Half-Price Books a few months ago. The cover seemed to show a man melting as he tried to open the doors of the mall! I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a horrific image? (If I did die at a mall, I would hope that I would at least die in an expensive store so people would be impressed when they heard.) I bought the book because of the cover and the cover is why I waited until horrorthon to read it.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the cover is the best thing about the book. It’s not really a horror novel, either. Sure, it’s listed as being a part of the horror genre on every online listing that I’ve found for it but the book itself is more of a Die Hard rip-off. (Yes, the book was published before Die Hard even went into production but that’s the power of Die Hard! It was being ripped off before it even existed.) The plot is that The Mall is a state-of-the-art playground for the upper and middle-classes. It was built by Mel Goodman, an industrialist who built himself up from nothing. On the same day that Mel is having his birthday party in the mall’s offices, his former employee, Jeffrey Prince, leads a group of criminals in an armed but surprisingly dull takeover of the mall. Prince threatens to kill everyone unless his financial demands are met. Unfortunately, no one can escape or enter the mall because the doors, I kid you not, have been superglued shut!
The frustrating thing about The Mall is that we are told that there are 40,000 people in the mall. And yet none of them really try to do anything to thwart Prince’s plans. Instead, they just wait patiently and some even continue to shop. That might seem like a satirical commentary on American consumerism but this isn’t half as clever (or emotionally resonant) as Dawn of the Dead. If anything, it’s the literary equivalent of one of those disaster films where a bunch of different people find themselves trapped in one location and they deal with their personal issues while waiting for the crisis to end. I’m a little bit surprised this was never turned into a made-for-TV movie.
In the end, it’s not a very good book but the cover continues to haunt me. Seriously, let that man out of the mall before he dissolves!
Through the Shattered Lens 