A Book Review - The Mall by Richie Tankersley Cusick (Point Horror)

Gosh, this was a weird book. My love for Cusick is well-documented (in these reviews) but this is such a bizarre book, quite different from her usual, I don't know how I feel about it. I got it in the mail on Halloween, having only read it once as a teenager (and not really remembering it; it was the same week I first read Caroline B. Cooney's The Stranger, which kind of eclipsed everything for a few weeks) and I lay on my bed upstairs for several hours, forgetting about trick-or-treaters or pumpkin carving, and getting seriously creeped out.

I was planning to say something about how the setting is unusual for RTC, since she usually likes to set her books around decaying gothic mansions - and then I realised, that's not really true. Of the RTC books that I've either just read or am just about to read, only Trick or Treat and Help Wanted are set in big old houses. The Lifeguard is set in a beach cottage on an island - atmospheric yes, gothic no. Teacher's Pet (currently reading) is based around a woodland retreat with log cabins; Fatal Secrets and April Fools are, as far as I remember, set in basically normal suburban neighborhoods, albeit rich ones. Huh. Funny how I think of Cusick books as gothic horror.

Anyway. Having a book set in a mall makes for an interesting experience. Of course, this isn't a normal mall. This is a Richie Tankersley Cusick mall, a mall of dark passages and intrigue and silent stalkers. This is the mall from my nightmares, and maybe from yours.

The plot is a little hard to follow for a first-time reader, or at least it was for me. I'm giving you a longer recap than usual because of the twists in the plot.

Trish is working at the muffin shop in the mall, and one day a very strange customer comes in and makes suggestive comments about her hands. Weird, but not worrying - YET. Later she's called out to her car, after receiving a message that someone hit it - yet the car is fine. However, when she's in the parking lot, a pay phone starts to ring, and when she answers it (don't answer a ringing payphone! This happens all the time in movies, and nothing good ever comes of it!) it's Muffin Man. "I'm eating the muffin," he says. "It tastes just like you."

Okay, it's only page 22 and I'm officially creeped out.

So Trish seems to have acquired a stalker. And I have to say, this stalker is considerably more spooky than others I've read about lately.

Trish has also captured the attention of handsome, mysterious, flirtatious Storm Reynolds, who works at the pizza counter and has all the girls swooning and yearning for his pepperoni. Ahem. Storm runs into her right after she gets the phone call and reports it to a cynical security guard who doesn't believe a word she says, so she's understandably freaked out. He walks her back to work and lets slip that he's been watching her closely, and knows her schedule. Hmm, suspicious.

Trish and her flirty friend Nita leave work only to find Wyatt - general odd-job guy at the mall - trying to break into Trish's car. Except he says he's not, he thought it was his car, which seems to have disappeared. Although this sounds highly suspicious to me, kind-hearted Trish and flirty Nita decide to drive Wyatt home, and stop to get food. Nita flirts. Wyatt does not. After dinner, Wyatt tells Trish she can drop him at the mall and he'll walk to a friend's house, since she has to drop Nita there at her car anyway. Trish drops Wyatt and Nita off and they go on their merry ways - and then Trish's car breaks down. So she goes and bangs on the mall door in the hopes that a security guard will let her in to use the phone, or something. It gets a bit unclear here, but I think Trish gets chased by someone, or maybe she's just jumping at shadows. Anyway, she falls and cuts her leg, and a young security guard lets her in. He bandages her up and they have a nice little chat about how Trish loves her job but hates her bitchy boss. Unfortunately, she knocks over a crate of bottles and breaks them, and when she goes to put them in the dumpster - well, there's a body who's been stabbed with an ice pick.

The guard is horrified, and radios for help. Then he tells Trish that she needs to get out of there, so she doesn't get involved and he doesn't lose his job for letting her into the mall at night. She gives him her address, and he calls her a cab.

Next day, there's nothing in the paper about the murder. Trish is surprised, but figures that the police are keeping it quiet. She decides to look for the guard to thank him for his help, and after giving a description of him to one of the guards on duty, she gets directed to a security guard named Roger.

Unfortunately, Roger's not the right guy. The general description fits, but his eyes and voice are wrong, and he doesn't have a scar. More sinisterly, Roger tells Trish that the mall doesn't have any night guards.

Trish is freaked out by this, and slowly realises that the guy who patched up her knee was only pretending to be a guard, and probably murdered the girl Trish found. And worse, since he called her a cab, he has her address.

Whoops.

Things get a bit disjointed from here on, perhaps reflecting Trish's panicked state. Muffin Man reappears at work, although he does nothing but look sinister, and Trish gets reamed by her supervisor for some imagined infraction of the rules. She and her friend Imogene - Nita's sister - walk down to the loading docks to pick up some stock, and Trish thinks she sees the security guard again - except this time he has a mustache and different hair, and he's dressed like a delivery man. On the way back upstairs, they find a long grey wig and beard - identical to Muffin Man's - in a bin.

Creepy.

Trish spends much of the rest of the book panicking in horror. She gets spooked by a workman and flees down an out-of-order escalator, which starts up while she's on it, throwing her to the bottom and injuring her quite badly. While she's in hospital that night, a shadowy sinister figure named Athan visits her, claiming that he is the one who's been stalking her, as he loves her and has decided that she belongs to him. He tells her that he knows where she lives, and that while he wouldn't hurt her, he'd hurt Nita and Imogene if Trish quits her job, which she's been planning to do.

Trish moves in with Nita and Imogene and their family for the foreseeable future, as her mother's in Europe. When Nita and Imogene are at work, and their parents have gone out to dinner, Athan calls and scares Trish so she leaves the house (even with her injuries) and goes to the library, where she runs into Storm. He convinces her to come and see something interesting, which turns out to be a deserted, falling-down house in a meadow that looks pretty when bathed in moonlight. She gets scared and runs from him, he wrestles her to the ground, she cries and asks him not to hurt her, he's horrified that he's scared her and begs her to tell him what's wrong. Then things seem to be going well, but he scares her again with some stupid ghost story. This guy takes social awkwardness to the max - first he basically kidnaps her, then wrestles with her even though she just got out of hospital, then the story thing. THEN he kisses her, and she seems to like it at first, until she slaps him and tells him to take her home. Which he does. A bit little and late, but oh well.

Next morning, she finds a tape from Athan in her car, spewing more of the same BS - she's a bad girl for going off and kissing Storm and talking to him about her problems, she belongs only to Athan, etc. Ah yes, the women-as-property trope that is so popular with stalkers. I bet most of them support the Tea Party. Trish immediately drives to the block of apartments where Storm said he lives - since she's now feeling bad for not trusting him, but surprise! His name ain't on any of the apartments. She doesn't feel safe at home or at the girls' house, and can't face school, so she goes to the mall. Which is probably the most unsafe place of all, but oh well. After a short chat with Wyatt, and her discovery that Bethany the Bitchy Boss didn't show up for her shift, she puts on her apron and starts working.

A message is left for Trish that implies that Imogene has been taken by Athan. Trish sets off for the delivery docks (located in the deepest basement of the building - is the mall built on a really steep hill?) to find her, and instead finds a shadow holding an ice pick and then the body of Bethany. She gets stuck in an elevator that the killer keeps playing with, moving it up and down without letting her out, and eventually - somehow - making it fall crashing to the bottom of the shaft, which knocks Trish unconscious. I have no idea how he does this; I didn't think elevators were built in such a way that it's possible to slow them or speed them up, but then I'm so untechnical that I have to call my ex-boyfriend for help every time I want to run a new program on my computer or take a photo using the flash on my camera. When she wakes up, Trish makes her way upstairs and finds that the mall is closed - except for one door. Nita's sweater is in the open doorway, so Trish infers that Nita is in trouble and runs up to Nita's store instead of out the open door to call for help.

The rest goes quite fast and frantically - in the store Trish is surprised by one of our suspects, and bashes him over the head. Bad choice, Trish - this is a Cusick book, and the first person you think is the bad guy never actually is. A piece of the mirror is missing, so she runs behind the mirror and down a long cobwebby passage that eventually takes her into a creepy underground - my autocorrect changed that to "unsettling" and that works too - room where lots of mannequins are stored, as well as a shrine to Trish with a four-poster bed and a wedding dress. Athan is unmasked, Trish is terrorised some more, and the suspects who didn't turn out to be freaky killers show up - late, but better than never - to save the day. One of them's been stabbed with Athan's ice pick, but he'll be okay. Probably. And Nita and Imogene are assumed to be safe at home, and the phone call and sweater were just misdirection.

The book ends with Athan's body being not quite visible anymore, and Trish thinking one of the mannequins moved, so we're left with some ambiguity about whether Athan was really dead or not. Uck. I usually like RTC's little unknowns (like who the heroine is going to end up with) - but having the murderer dead or alive isn't a little unknown, it's a honking great one and I felt the book would have had a much nicer ending without it.

Jeebus, that was a long recap. Usually I stick to a paragraph or two, but this was such a damn twisty book, with just about everything that happened being integral to the plot.

Did I like it? Yes. No. Maybe. I haven't a clue.

It was very unsettling, and totally unrelenting, pace-wise. One thing I enjoy about Point Horrors in general and Cusick in particular is that they're not just horror, they're horror against a backdrop of American teenage life. Our characters get some scares, alternated with some peaceful periods where they talk or eat or make out. Even in books like Trick or Treat or Teacher's Pet, where the gothic atmosphere is pervasive and oppressive and casts a dark shadow on everything, there are still those periods of safety where our heroines get to sit down and take a breather. The Mall didn't allow that; even during the times when Trish was away from the mall there was still the feeling that she could be attacked at any moment, and I didn't like that. I need periods of peace in my books, not only because they give the characters - and by extension, the reader - a chance to recharge their batteries for the fight ahead, but because I think it's nice to see characters in more normal situations - it allows them to seem more like people and less like featureless blobs of fear and panic. So I missed that about this book.

The guys...I was hoping for someone to rival Conor from Trick or Treat or Neale from The Lifeguard. I didn't get that. The guys in this were - well, they acted pretty dickish at times. Storm, and to a lesser extent Wyatt, had the whole sexy douchebag thing going on. I can't decide if I liked them or found them really distasteful. I'm leaning towards like, but several of the scenes, and the whole scene with Storm and the car and the abandoned house, made me quite uncomfortable.

So, character-wise, I don't think this is Ms Cusick's best book. And plot-wise, the pace was too unrelenting for me personally, and I can also see how it would have too many twists and turns for a lot of people to keep up. I actually had to re-skim a lot of the book to write this review, and I only read it on Halloween five or six days ago.

So why the four-star rating?

Well, because it really, really scared me.

And that's exactly why I bought it to start with.

Verdict: Great book? Eh, passable. Great horror? Absolutely.