Sometimes a book title hits the nail squarely on the head in terms of it catching my eye and getting me to pick it up straight away. It could be a book about... well... anything. If the title does it’s job properly then it doesn’t matter, I’m up for giving it a few pages at least! ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ is one of those titles; a title that works if you have a passing knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft or even if you just like the sound of an octopus headed monster (with a weird name) turning up in a shopping mall.
Happily enough, I fall into both of these categories (I’m also a person who secretly hopes for a ‘Godzilla/Cthulhu Faceoff’ in the River Thames by my office, could liven things up a bit around here...) so one look at the title and I was hooked on the idea of giving this book a go. I had an issue with the structure of the novel but one thing that I couldn’t complain about was the amount of fun I had reading this one...
Laura and Ted’s unlikely friendship arose from an even more unlikely source. Ten years ago, Ted rescued fellow college student Laura from certain death (undeath?) at the hands of a vampire sorority and hasn’t left her side since. These days Laura can be found working for the FBI (although it’s not what she was expecting) while Ted works at the coffee shop across the street (it is exactly what he was expecting, although he has perfected the ultimate latte...) All that is about to change though when Ted unwittingly stumbles on a plot to resurrect the dread god Cthulhu in a Providence mall. Ted and Laura have to take action and do so in style on a mission that will take in the sights of Boston, Providence and sunken R’lyeh itself. Nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake here...
‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ is many things. It’s a horror novel that takes the time to be unexpectedly funny as well. It’s a fast paced tale of adventure that’s also a wry commentary on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a novel of conspiracies at the highest level. It’s an examination of an interdependent relationship born out of violent trauma. The problem is though, ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ is only a mere two hundred and thirty five pages long...
What this essentially means is that ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ is a book that wants to be many things but doesn’t give itself the space to do any of them as effectively as it could. The hints you get are delicious (more on that in a bit) but left me wanting more instead of being fully sated. I don’t know if this is the first book in a series; if it is then that might just explain a few things and ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ could well be a book that improves in the reading once it’s part of a larger picture. What I was left with though was a book that promised lots more... but wouldn’t let me at it! Maybe if the book had concentrated on one or two areas, to the exclusion of others, things would have felt a little more coherent. Either that or a couple of hundred pages extra would have worked just as nicely!
Like I said, all of that isn’t to say that what you do get isn’t worth the time. It really is. The structure of the book may be a little ‘patchy’ but the payoff here is that you get a narrative which throws the reader straight into a plot that maintains a fast moving tempo throughout. Something is always happening and deft use of ‘the cliff hanger’ means that there is always a good reason to keep the pages turning. ‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ mixes police procedural and chilling supernatural terror very well in this respect.
There’s plenty of humour to be found although it was more of the ‘chuckle’ rather than ‘laugh out loud’ kind. Ted trying to wake Cthulhu itself was the ‘laugh out loud’ exception! The humour also serves to highlight just how ‘wrong’ the Lovecraftian moments are; in a supernatural sense as well as other ways...
‘It’s kinda convenient that so much of this stuff is unknowably indescribable, isn’t it? I mean, it really saves him [H.P. Lovecraft] from having to imagine something and then describe it. So basically we have no idea what to look for.’
Cooper leaves his reader in no doubt that he’s a Lovecraft fan who can see the faults as well!
‘The Mall of Cthulhu’ is one hell of a lot of fun, there’s no denying it. I just couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t tried to be too many things then it could have been even better...
Eight and a Quarter out of Ten
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