The Mall

June 9, 2014
This debut collaboration of South African writers Sarah Lotz (The Three) and Louis Greenberg (Dark Windows) squeezes two young protagonists between dead-end realities and a horrifying if gratifying fantasy. Rhoda, losing track of her child at the Highgate Mall while buying cocaine, coerces bookstore worker Daniel at knifepoint to help search the service corridors and back entrances. Their journey rapidly goes south as seemingly familiar territory becomes more and more bizarre. Fleeing through flooded tunnels and decoding a deadly elevator trap, they escape into an altered version of the mall where sales staff are chained to their stations and emaciated and amputated models flaunt the latest fashions. Grey has fun with the misshapen reflection of consumer culture (bookstores offering Jesus Wants You to Be Pimp-Rich and arched eateries named McColon’s) but also has the sensitivity to allow characters to react naturally and to change from their experiences. Horror fans will enjoy this surreal and disorienting dream quest.

May 15, 2014
Ready to shop 'til you drop? Wage-slave Daniel is closing up the mall bookstore when he's coerced at knifepoint to help a coke-addled woman, Rhoda, find the child she's lost somewhere in the building. But those interchangeable service hallways are tricky, aren't they? Chased by something large, the duo crosses stairways, ramps, and ladders, ever downward into an apocalyptic hell of dismembered mannequins and blind, starving hobos. Text messages from the spammer from hell indicate they're caught in some sort of gametake, for instance, the do-or-die name-that-Muzak-song in a plummeting elevator. Halfway through the novel, Grey abandons this abstract nightmare for a more pointed satire of consume-at-all-costs culture, with Daniel becoming a semilobotomized laborer in an alternate-world mall while Rhoda becomes an obsessed Shopper who'd sell her soul for a nice handbag. The two halves don't exactly jibe, but they're both ber-icky and held together by a wonderfully evolving relationship between the protagonists. It's a great pleasure to find a horror author with something to say, so be a good consumer and stock up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)