By Kim McCullough
Kill the Mall by Pasha Malla opens with an eloquent letter penned by a never-named narrator seeking a placement as the local shopping mall’s artist-in-residence. After winning, he finds himself on display, mandated to “make art” and “engage the public.”
The mall security guard, K. Sohail, shows the narrator around and gets him settled. The narrator is disconcerted to find that the guard’s last task before leaving each night is to lock him into his room. One of the few named characters in the book, K. Sohail anchors both narrator and reader to the outside world as events inside the mall descend into fantastical strangeness. She moves in and out of the story at critical junctures; the reader can never be sure if she is friend or foe.
The menace that lurks beneath the familiar throbs with hints of malice right from the start. Soon, horrific interactions and supernatural threats arise from the usually commonplace customers and stores the reader expects in a mall.
Malla amps up the creepiness through his use of adversaries like hostile clumps of hair and a gang of cars in the parkade. Teenagers who prepare whole roasted chickens at the food court’s only restaurant are blank and robotic. The narrator’s friendship with a salesman from a jeans store is detached yet obsessive. By the time his true nemesis arrives, stealing his artist-in-residence limelight, the reader has left behind all expectations and is invested in seeing if the narrator makes it out alive.
Malla balances the story between horror and hilarity—the tension between these two poles never lets up. There is a low-grade hum of disorientation throughout the story that calls to mind psychological horror stories by Iain Reid, Stephen King, and at times, whiffs of Edgar Allan Poe. The ridiculousness of some scenes cannot be overstated. Not to give anything away, but the scenes with the ponytails will make the reader laugh—nervous laughter underscored with unease. These things couldn’t really happen. Or could they?
Malla’s control over the narrative is impressive. The progress report sections are brilliant in their syntax and construction. Every week the reports heighten the deepening unreality of the narrator’s situation. Malla never clears up whether the events of the story are in the narrator’s head or if they’re actually happening, but in the end, the reader’s desire for answers is sated by the beautiful sentences, deftly set mood, and incredible craftsmanship of the book.