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I'm working my way through an odd horror novel that I picked up some time back: The Mall, by S.L. Grey. Set in South Africa, it's about two people - a babysitter and a mall employee - who get Very Lost while searching for a child who ran away into the service corridors. The trail takes them on a disturbing journey through labyrinthine hallways, fetid rooms, and ultimately they find their way back to the main area of the mall... but everything's different. Workers are chained to their posts, all the shops are sinister versions of themselves, and that's only the obvious stuff.
It looks like this is first in a series of at least three, but I don't know whether the other books are true sequels or more stories in the same setting. One annoying thing is that some hyphens are missing, apparently where they coincided with line breaks in the printed copy. For instance, "run-of-the-mill" might pop up as "run-ofthe-mill".
If nothing else, this has the virtue of being a distinct change of pace for me lately. It kind of reminds me of Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train or Skipp and Spector's work, with the sense that you could be minding your own business one day, take a wrong turn, and end up in a previously-unsuspected nightmare world that's been right beside you all along. Definitely not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.
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