Somewhere among the shuttered stores…
Lisa hears a call for help.
She finds her senile old coworker, Saswin, lost in an abandoned hallway. He’s talking to a circle of mannequins, their limbs twisted and fused in unnatural ways.
When Lisa looks away, she swears the mannequins have moved…
And that this abandoned hallway has grown longer.
After Saswin disappears down the impossible hallway, Lisa goes to find him, but she’s unprepared for the horrors that await her in the mall’s forgotten depths.
So, the last book I read by Ben Farthing (I Found Puppets Living in my Apartment Walls) got me to step a little further into his works to see what else he has up his sleeves. I chose this one specifically because I like liminal horror, and this is prime liminality if I’ve ever seen it.
It’s a quick read, very nice, and sometimes it’s nice to read a book that doesn’t have you sitting and grinding it into dust to get at the meaning and the symbolism. The main character, Lisa, is even aware of the mall’s predicament resembling her own.
She’s having a crisis of identity, a longing to feel needed where she is, a fear of moving forward and becoming a relic of the past. Her pursuit of her friend Saswin, suffering from dementia, is basically a pursuit of her future self as she sees it. Age comes for her in many forms— her daughter has a healthy baby boy and wants to take care of her, her body doesn’t quite move like she wants it to, her husband is showing his age after he suffered a stroke— and she has settled into a well-worn spot that she’s made for herself.
The mall begs her to stay, to never leave, to help it keep things as it always was. But life moves on without it, and this is the path Lisa is on.
Her family helps her, certainly, but most of all, it’s Lisa herself. She doesn’t want to end up like the mall, so she moves forward. It seems so simple when she suggested it to that little god, but for her, it’s a monumental move. Good job, Lisa.
