Kill the Mall by Pasha Malla

“Pasha Malla writes like a reincarnated Kafka.” —Ian Williams, winner of the Giller Prize for Reproduction

Douglas Adams meets David Lynch in this ingenious, witty fable about one of North America’s most surreal inventions—the local mall.

After writing a letter in praise of malls, our eccentric narrator is offered a residency at a shabby suburban shopping centre. His mission: to occupy the mall for several weeks, splitting his time between “making work” and “engaging the public,” all while chronicling his adventures in weekly progress reports.

Before long, a series of strange after-hour events rattles our hero, and he sets forth on a nightly quest to untangle the mysterious forces at play in the mall’s unmapped recesses. Things quickly get hairy, and our narrator’s optimism about his mall residency descends into doubt, and then into a full-blown phantasmagoria of horror and (possibly) murder. With the aid of a weird and wonderful cast of mall-dwelling misfits—including a pony named Gary—our narrator is forced to conclude that his new residence may not be the temple of consumer bliss he initially imagined, but something far more sinister. And who, or what, is benefitting from its existence?

Much like the shopping centres it praises and parodies, Pasha Malla’s wildly adventurous novel follows its own internal logic, channeling its narrator’s unshakeable innocence to explore the darker edges of human (and other) nature.

Story Locale: the mall

PASHA MALLA is the author of five works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novel People Park. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. It has also been shortlisted for the Amazon.ca Best First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Prize, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Pasha Malla lives in Hamilton.

Author Residence: Toronto, Canada

Author Hometown: Toronto, Canada

9780735273498
Paperback , Trade
English
General Trade
Feb 02, 2021