Author Seamus Cooper’s sense of pacing is usually pretty good, his dialog is often sharp (a bit too sharp in places, as noted below), his scenes quick and to the point. Unfortunately, “Mall of Cthulhu” doesn’t do it for me. While transporting the Cthulhu cycle into the modern day, alongside cell phones, shopping malls, computer games and designer coffee shops sounds like a good idea, “Mall of Cthulhu” is simply too self-aware for its own good and can’t make up its mind whether it’s homage, satire or serious storytelling. It certainly does not fit comfortably into the body of Lovecraft-inspired fiction.
In the novel’s prolog the main character Ted (and unless it’s buried somewhere in a paragraph and I missed it, Ted’s last name is never revealed for reasons known only to the author) saves co-ed Laura Harker from a sorority full of lesbian vampires, and if you’re thinking that lesbian vampires are poor fit for Lovecraft’s mythos, you’re not alone.
The story picks up a few years later with Laura as an FBI agent involved in the search for fugitive “Whitey” (presumably real-life fugitive Whitey Bulger) and Ted in a dead end job as a barista in a chain coffee shop called Queequeg’s (get it?). While it’s intriguing, there’s no real connection between the vampire sorority and the rest of the novel, other than to introduce Ted and Laura to the supernatural. It also establishes Laura as gay, thus making their relationship entirely platonic. When an angry customer shoots up Queequeg’s while Ted is lunching with Laura, Ted does the most natural thing in the world. He panics and flees without calling the police, letting the world think that he was somehow involved in the shooting, then begs Laura to help him hide. When they look at a CD that the killer was carrying, Ted and Laura discover evidence that he was part of a group that is conspiring to reawaken the Old Ones and destroy the world. This involves a bunch of white supremacist cultists who think Cthulhu will simply wipe out all the mongrel races (yeah, right), corrupt public works employees, excavations under Lovecraft’s old house to find missing portions of the Necronomicon, and of course a shopping mall that will serve as the doorway through which the Old Ones will enter our world.
“Mall of Cthulhu” meanders through this plot somewhat like Ted himself after a few bong hits. Though the scenes tend to be short and pithy, a lot of them go nowhere. Random cleverness like calling a minor character “William Castle” (the guy who ran wires under theater seats to shock audience members during scary parts of movies in the ‘60s and ‘70s) is inserted for no good reason. Minor characters wander in, are introduced and explored and are never heard from again. Important characters don’t show up until nearly the end of the book. Characters have backstory that has no real effect on the novel.
Though snappy, dialog often feels contrived and unnatural. At one point, Ted mutters to himself, “Yog-sothoth on a bike! This guy’s a friggin’ Cthulhu freak!” When Ted comes stumbling in after an adventure, Laura says “Please tell me that’s not my computer under your arm. And please tell me that dried, milky substance on it is, in fact milk, because otherwise I’m going to have to puke and kill you, not necessarily in that order.” I know it’s supposed to be funny, but it sounds terribly artificial and contrived. Who really talks like that, anyway?
Jokes are repeated until they’re no longer funny, and many aren’t even funny to start with. Early in the book, for example, Ted meets an attractive female customer who says she’s named after a Fleetwood Mac song (in this case, Rhiannon). This leads to a running gag that lasts several more pages in which Ted calls her “Landslide,” “You Make Loving Fun” and “Go Your Own Way.” Then Laura, driving the bit into the ground with a 12-pound sledgehammer, makes jokes about Special Agents “Big Love” and “Gypsy.” Enough, already.
Rhiannon is a good example of a character who is introduced, developed and treated as if she is important to the story, then discarded entirely. After flirting with Ted at the beginning of the book, we never hear from her again. This goes for several other characters, including a mall security officer named John Thomas, who is apparently introduced to Ted can secretly snigger at his name. By the time I was half-way through this book, every time Ted spoke all I heard in my head was the voice of Beavis saying “Heh-heh. Yeah. Cool. Heh-heh.”
Ted himself was a huge impediment to my enjoyment of the novel. Bluntly put he’s a self-centered tool. He flees the scene of a vicious murder, begs his friend to provide shelter, threatening both her career and freedom, then completely ignores every rule and piece of advice she gives him, risking both their lives. Laura very clearly tells Ted not to surf porn on her laptop, for example, and what’s the first thing he does the minute she’s out of the room? You guessed it. Yes, surfing adult websites on a government-owned computer, especially in a sensitive position like the FBI, is a first-class ticket to the unemployment line, or even federal custody. Very funny, Ted. Very cute.
I have very little sympathy for a character who ransacks his best friend’s apartment looking for liquor (this immediately after the aforementioned porn surfing), then leaves the apartment because he’s bored (of course Laura told him not to lest he be spotted and arrested, thus implicating her and destroying her career) and merits the following passage: “He pulled on his new Miskatonic U. t-shirt, sniffed his boxers and decided that he’d be going commando today, and pulled on his pants.”
Confronted with these and other irritating antics, we’re apparently supposed to cluck our tongues, sigh and grin “Oh, that Ted! What a wacky but loveable slacker barista!” Unfortunately my main reaction to the character was “Jesus! What a stupid, selfish douchebag!” After a few chapters of Ted’s slovenliness, smarm and inconsiderate narcissism, I found myself hoping that the Old Ones would return and destroy humanity, so we wouldn’t have to put up with any more of his whining.
While working undercover at the mall, Ted runs into a fanboy’s dream girl – a pierced and tattooed goth chick named Cayenne, who upon their second meeting hands him a bag from the mall bakery and says (wait for it), “Well do you wanna eat my muffin?” Again, despite the story’s satirical trappings, unfunny lines like that drag the entire affair to a screaming halt.
Cayenne gets a little character development later (she has a tragic past that gets mentioned once then glossed over) and for reasons known only to herself, falls hard for Ted, swallowing his stories of lesbian vampires, Cthulhu cultists and FBI agents hook line and sinker. Hey, she’s a hot goth chick that any roleplaying male (and some roleplaying females, I imagine) would give a right arm for, but no one said she was terribly smart.
Cayenne is later sucked into a gate created by the cultists. Suddenly heroic after spending most of the book being a jerk, Ted follows her to R’lyeh , where they eventually meet up and have sex in the shadow of slumbering Cthulhu, but actually she serves no real purpose in the story other than to give our self-involved hero a muffin to eat.
Though my initial enthusiasm for the book transformed into an overwhelming sense of “meh,” by the time Ted and Cayenne reached R’lyeh I started to actively dislike “Mall of Cthulhu.” Ted once more proves himself to be a dumbass prick when, after seeing Cthlulhu’s sleeping form, he immediately starts jumping on the Old One’s head, trying to wake him up.
Now think about this – Ted has been established as a real Lovecraft buff, and he knows everything there is to know about the big guy. He should know that when Cthulhu awakens he’s going to destroy the whole effing world, and yet because he’s bored and lonely, he goes ahead and throws rocks and leaps up and down on Cthulhu’s head. Our hero passes from the realm of mere d-baggery to become a complete shit who is willing to doom every human on the planet because he’s tired of wandering around R’lyeh. It’s only the appearance of Cayenne (kicking Cthulhu in the tentacles... heh-heh... I said “tentacles”... cool...) that diverts Ted from his suicidal pastime.
The vast slumbering bulk of Cthulhu is not adequately described – heck, we all know what he looks like, right? Ted feels no horror upon observing this impossibly ancient and evil being. He doesn’t feel anything other than annoyance at R’lyeh’s bizarre non-Euclidian geometry. He doesn’t encounter any shoggoths, dark young or deep ones. He just climbs up onto Cthulhu and starts jumping on him. If Twilight managed to completely defang vampires as objects of horror, “Mall of Cthulhu” does a similar job on the Old Ones.
(And while I’m at it, isn’t R’lyeh supposed to be sunk in the incalculable depths of the ocean, beyond light and hope? How then do Ted and Cayenne manage to wander around two-backed-beasting and making snuggly noises together? And how the hell can someone have sex when Cthulhu is a literal stone’s throw away?)
Also near the end of the novel, Laura encounters an entirely new character – a representative of a secret monster-hunting branch of the FBI (yawn), who explains everything to her and helps her break up the cult’s conspiracy. This guy came completely out of left field (resembling what gamers refer to as an “Ass-born NPC”) and though he certainly made the novel’s last few chapters more exciting, he was also a huge deus ex machina thrown in to enable Laura (who had up to this point mostly wandered around and looked at video tapes) to have some car chases and fistfights, thus resolving the cult subplot with no fuss and no muss.
Aside from the unlikable Ted, the novel’s main problem is its tone. While I guess it shows me to be a purist, I think that if one is to write a Lovecraft homage without certain elements, it no longer qualifies as an homage. It’s just a novel with some Lovecraftian trappings.
“Mall of Cthulhu” isn’t a horror novel. It has almost no horrific elements. Even the bloody massacre at the coffee shop reads more like a crime novel than a work of supernatural horror. The remainder of the book simply chronicles, in often painful detail, Ted and Laura’s surveillance of cult activities near the titular mall before Ted starts wandering around R’lyeh and gets to bang Cayenne among the ruins. Laura’s side of the plot actually gains a little momentum when she’s introduced to the X-files guy, but even this is more like an action movie rather than something associated with Lovecraft.
Despite some shortcomings as both writer and human being, H.P. Lovecraft wrote outstanding supernatural fiction. His most successful stories draw the reader in with a palpable and growing sense of dread, as if fearful secrets lie just beyond the frontiers of perception, and those secrets are so dark and terrifying that the human mind cannot withstand their revelation. Even knowing this, Lovecraft’s characters continue to probe ever deeper into darkness, usually with predictable results. Lovecraft combined the fear of the unknown with the often self-destructive curiosity that all humans have to create stories that continue to plague a reader’s thoughts and dreams for years after reading them.
There’s nothing like that in “Mall of Cthulhu.” If it isn’t a horror novel, it’s not comedy or satire either. “Mall of Cthulhu” is painfully self-aware. Ted is a hip twenty-something barista who works in a trendy coffee shop. He’s read Lovecraft. He’s played rpgs. He knows all about the Old Ones and how they slumber, awaiting their horrific resurrection. He makes jokes about them. He probably even has one of those plush Cthulhu dolls in his apartment. There is no horror or dread in the Old Ones or their cultists’ plans because everything is already out in the open. Seamus Cooper is writing to all of us who play “Arkham Horror” and read Li’l Cthluhu web comics (the title of the book is even set in the same font as Chaosium’s “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying game). This is a world where HPL is in the mainstream, and it just isn’t effective as a result. Come to think of it, one could make the argument that pastiches and homages to Lovecraft work better in a world where Lovecraft himself never existed, but that’s probably a matter for a different discussion.
The layout and appearance of the book are excellent, earning a 4, but the book itself fails on most levels. I’ll be generous and give it a 2. Despite some promising ideas, “Mall of Cthulhu” fails as both humor and as horror, and is simply too light and self-consciously clever to be part of the serious Lovecraft canon. Better luck next time, Mr. Cooper.
