The Menstruating Mall | Carlton Mellick III

The Menstruating Mall | Carlton Mellick III | Fun, satirical, read

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The Menstruating Mall

	The Menstruating Mall Carlton Mellick III Afterbirth Books, 2005 - 212 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Ten ridiculously stereotypical consumer victims (a yuppie, a housewife, a retiree, a jock, a bible thumper, a cowboy, a preppy, a gamer, a goth, and a white suburban gangsta) find themselves unable to leave the mall one day. There is nothing stopping them. The doors are unlocked. Other shoppers are able to come and go as they please. But for some inexplicable reason, these ten people cannot pry themselves away from their shopping miasma. The mall closes, and they won't leave. Days pass, and they're still there, eating meals in the food court and sleeping in department store bedroom displays. Then they begin to die off, one by one, murdered by a mysterious killer, and they still won't allow themselves to escape. Carlton Mellick III's "The Menstruating Mall" is both a modernized take on Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," and a parody of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None." Featuring mock mall advertisements by retard punk hero Food Fortunata and cover art by Skin242.

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One of Mellick's best

This book is hyper fun. Ten characters shopping in a mall suddenly find that they can't bring themselves to leave, the mall closes, they are stuck there and find themselves in the middle of a mall-world that in undergoing some fundamental shift. The mall itself is like some kind of living being that is on its period and transforming in some weird ways. If that isn't distraction enough, the characters are starting to be killed off one by one in very strange and hilarious ways by a serial killer. This book is surreal, funny, irreverent, satirical, and touching. I highly recommend it!

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Fun, satirical, read

I read this book in between my college classes. It is fast paced and fun to read and made me laugh out loud about a dozen times. The characters are hilariously stereotypical but definitely that way by design. This book has definitely surreal moments and circumstances, as the title mentions, the mall is literally menstruating, which even though that is hard to picture or understand, it actually makes sense in the context of this book. I've read other books by Carlton Mellick III and I would say that this is one of his best. The plot is well fleshed out and the setting is very strange and compelling. Oh, and the illustrations are killer!

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Read this instead of Stephen King

Faster, funner, grosser, funnier, cleverer, weirder... everything "-er." If you're sick of the same old 400 pg. snooze with a little twist at the end, read this instead. It's got the humor and the horror that makes a great horror movie, plus the pacing to get you through it.

Don't shop at this mall!

Okay, there is this really big suburban shopping mall, but ordinary really big, not biggest-in-the-world big. On a Friday afternoon, it is pretty crowded, with lots of different kinds of people, some more ordinary than others. One of them is a guy named John, and he is a bit lonely, a workaholic, a bit drab, and very consumerismistic (probably not a word, so equate it with "Yuppie"). When the mall is about to close, John goes to leave . . . but cannot. He simply cannot get even close to the door, before he loses all ability to move forward. He does more shopping, tries to leave again, and still cannot. John really wants to go, so that he can work overtime and earn more money, so he can buy more things. He simply cannot leave. John even looks around for security guards, who would normally escort out those who will not leave, but he cannot find one. Not one. Frustrated and beginning to despair, John hides . . . in the john.

The next day dawns, John eats at the food court, and still cannot leave. He starts to notice that there are several people there, whom he saw the day before. As time goes on, it becomes clear that there are ten people who cannot leave the mall, and each is the epitome of whatever he or she is. John the Yuppie, Jen the Preppy, Spyder the Gamer, Cedrick the White Gangsta, Aaron the Cowboy, Brock the Jock, Chloe the Goth Girl, an old man (he does not give his name, I believe) who is the Retiree, Wyoming the Housewife, and Carole the Super-religious. The ten of them try to figure out how to escape the mall, but none of their ideas work. Then, they notice that nobody else is in the mall any more. There are many people standing outside, staring inside, expressionlessly.

Then, the first person dies, possibly by suicide, but probably not. Is the killer one of the remaining nine? They try to piece it together, but no luck. Another one dies, and it clearly is murder. The killer leaves a message behind, that the remaining eight can survive, if they can prove they are able to break out of their respective stereotypes. They act weirder and weirder, trying to prove they can go beyond their typical, mundane selves.

This sounds strange? It gets much, much more bizarre after that, ending up in what could be described as a suburban consumerist nightmare dreamscape. By the way, the title of the book is not symbolic, but literal. Does anyone survive? I will not tell. Would you want any of them to survive, by the end? I am not sure I did.

This is one of the most bizarre books that I have read, and I am sure that Carlton Mellick III (the author) would take that as the highest praise. I have read two other books of his: Sea of the Patchwork Cats (Avant Punk Book Club) and Punk Land, and those two are also some of the most bizarre books I have read. This author strives (and sometimes strains) to be bizarre. On to specifics:

While very strange, there is also a very, very interesting story here. I often found it revolting and disgusting, but it was also riveting. I had trouble stopping, despite often wanting to find a seek out the nearest incinerator in which to deposit this book.

By the way, this is not a novel, by formal definition. While it has over two hundred pages (which are not numbered!), it also has very large print, and it is littered with "illustrations" or "advertisements". I used the word "littered" very intentionally, as they were definitely the part of the book I liked the least. These pictures are on a par with public restroom (or high school bathroom) graffiti. I refer to both the quality of these line drawings, and to the vulgar, profane, and consistently scatological content of the drawings. They are parodies of advertisements of well-known franchise stores. I am surprised that the author, the illustrator, and/or the publisher did not get sued by many of these chains. I guess that the drawings are no outrageously insulting that they figured that no one could possibly take them seriously. I did not take them seriously, nor did I find them funny.

I did not enjoy reading this book. I did not hate reading this book. I will never read it again. I will never forget it. I will try to, but I fear that I will fail. But, I could not stop reading it either. When you were a little kid, and had a loose tooth, did you wiggle it, even though it hurt? That is a good analogy for reading this book. Wiggle, wiggle. Ow! Wiggle, wiggle.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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