Initial Thoughts: Beware the Shopping Mall has to be the most 80s book title I’ve ever heard. Ever.
Recap: Specifically it sounds kind of early to mid-80s. It’s hard to image anyone being this excited about a shopping mall after that point in history:
“Wonderland Mall Opens Today!” I shouted happily. I read the giant billboard aloud as Mom drove past it and followed the long stream of traffic into the main parking area for the new shopping mall.
p. 1
But Robin’s mom immediately adds a chilling note, pointing out that the mall is built on the former Mournful Swamp:
“I’ll never forget when three teenagers disappeared in the swamp. It was back when I was in high school. Everybody assumed they walked into quicksand and were sucked under, but nobody really knows what happened to them. Remember that story?”
p. 1
Geez, Robin’s mom, it would be pretty hard to FORGET that story. It doesn’t stop her dropping Robin off, though, to join her friends Lisa, Shannon, and Eric. It’s weird how books and television shows do that: stick one boy in the group (or one girl). I never in my entire life of hanging out places hung out with a group of other girls and just one guy.
There’s a huge crowd of people ahead of them (wait, is there a line to get into the mall?), so they sneak in through an employee entrance, even though one of their friends hasn’t joined them yet. Just so you know, the friend is a girl named Jamie with short white-blonde hair. Yes, you need to know that detail. There’ll be a short quiz later.
They almost get caught in the scary behind-stage offices-and-corridors part of the mall, but they duck into a dark room full of mannequins. That is legitimately terrifying to me, because I hate and fear them.
So while they’re wandering around in the backrooms, Robin finds a creepy crack in the basement floor that has been cemented back together. There’s a crack like that in my garage, but with much less backstory:
“But they cemented it up, and everything was okay,” Eric said. “It’s funny when you think about it, though. So many creepy things happened while this mall was being built. Remember the dump truck that poured a load of rocks on a workman and killed him?”
p. 16
So far the scariest thing about this book is the sociopathic way in which characters keep glibly tossing out anecdotes about deaths.
Robin also hears the machines chanting surnames, including HER surname, but the others have gone on ahead and miss this bit.
Once out in the main part of the mall, they’re greeted by a perky, too-pretty-to-be-real teenager who gives them a map of the mall. An identical teenager is working in Video Showcase, and she claims she doesn’t have a twin.
They separate briefly, and Robin ends up looking in the window of a swimwear shop called Mermaid Magic. She sees a mannequin that looks exactly like their friend Jamie, and goes looking for Shannon and Lisa, but ends up getting jump scared by them in a dark hallway.
Robin goes back to look at the Jamie Mannequin, but now it’s glaring angrily at her. That can’t be good.
She catches back up with Shannon and Lisa, and they buy tickets to a movie, but it doesn’t start for forty-five minutes so they go to a department store called Stryker’s. Robin sees a teenage-boy mannequin down by the changerooms, and its eyes and mouth are moving.
The mannequin did look like one of Eric’s friends.
It looked exactly like Aaron Stemple.
p. 45
A sales clerk pulls a curtain across, hiding him from view. Robin tries to show Eric, ends up walking in on an actual teenage guy trying on clothes, and basically only succeeds in making Eric angry. I’m not entirely sure why he’s angry, since she’s obviously upset; I mean, even if he doesn’t believe her, perhaps he should be concerned?
She tells Lisa and Shannon about what she’s been seeing, and they are concerned, and take her for a cold drink in the food court. That’s a very 80s-mall way to deal with stress and/or delusions, and I fully approve. I mean, I don’t think it will help, I just like it.
By now they’re late for the movie, and this is starting to feel like one of those nightmares where you can’t accomplish anything. They keep separating and finding each other and trying to get places and getting interrupted. It’s not scary, exactly, but it is inducing stress in me.
They argue their way into getting their cash back–good for them–and then search the arcade for Aaron. A teenage boy who looks exactly like the one in the theatre who just refunded their money tries to convince Robin to play the video game way back in the corner that “the kids hardly ever notice.” He even offers her a free turn. Robin correctly assumes this is a bad idea, especially since the game is called The Haunted Shopping Mall.
The boy’s eyes glow red and Robin starts to feel hypnotized, but a little girl gets between her and the glowy teenager, asking him for change for a dollar.
Robin catches up to Lisa, and sees Shannon in a shop talking to a sales clerk.
Behind her wire-rimmed glasses her eyes took on a look of alarm. She seemed to be trying to cry out, but her lips barely moved. No sound came out! Shannon grabbed wildly at the clerk, but her arm made only a jerky motion and then grew stiff, stopping halfway out in the air. And her skin took on a plasticlike shine.
p. 69
Lisa heads into the store to get a closer look, because she’s trying to convince herself she didn’t just see her friend turn into a mannequin. Robin follows her, which is honestly more than I’d do at this point, because I’d be running. They see the Shannon Mannequin up close, and the Jamie one is next to her, and then the sales clerk comes up behind them and offers to help them find something to try on.
They try to leave, and realize the store is full of mannequins.
It was then I realized that mannequins were all over the store. There were displays of mannequins roping fake cows and riding fake horses. Others were showing off elaborate pairs of cowboy boots. I had never seen so many dummies modeling clothing in one store before in my life.
p. 76
I’m sorry, you just walked past all that on your way into the store and didn’t notice? That’s less believable than the part where your friend turned into a mannequin.
The sales clerk blocks the doorway and tries to hypnotize them with her glowing blue eyes, but Robin closes her eyes and drags Lisa away. So now they’re hiding in the store while the clerk tries to find them, gah. The girls escape into the store’s back room and then through the freight entrance, and this is the third time Robin’s been in the creepy backstage area of the mall.
They end up in that storage room full of mannequins from the beginning of the book. Several of them are people they know from school.
Someone comes into the room carrying a mannequin; she’s the same darked-haired sales clerk who hid the Aaron Mannequin from view and later moved the Jamie Mannequin out of the Mermaid Magic window. Robin and Lisa freeze in place, pretending to be mannequins themselves.
The word mannequin has started to look really strange and I can’t tell anymore if I’m spelling it right.
Robin and Lisa find their way back into the main mall, and Lisa wants to look for a payphone and call her dad. Every now and then there’s a little detail like that which overwhelms me with nostalgia for malls.
Instead they try to make it outside to the bus stop, and clone-salespeople keep popping out of doorways and trying to entice them into stores. There are basically endless iterations of three variations of sales clerk at this mall: teen girl with blonde hair, teen girl with dark French braid, and the teen boy from the theatre.
Lisa disappears while they’re trying to find Eric, whose existence they suddenly remember. Robin finds Eric in a sporting goods store, but he’s been mannequinned already.
Robin makes it outside, but it’s dark and she’s missed the last bus, and it’s almost time for the mall to close. She goes back inside to look for a payphone. No. Why? Don’t go back in, geez. She calls home, but there’s no answer, and then she sees a Lisa Mannequin in the jewelry store.
I sat there staring at the head. Of all my friends that had come to the mall together, I was the only one left.
Just then I heard the mall’s doors slam shut and the automatic locks clang into place.
p. 108
Robin tries to find her way out, but the three store clerks (the blonde girl, the one with the French braid, and the teenage boy) are after her, as well as a whole lot of mannequins.
To my horror, leading the parade was a mannequin with white-blonde hair, one with wire-rimmed glasses, a boy mannequin carrying a tennis racket, and a laughing jewelry-store head, floating and bobbing in the air.
p. 112
Robin’s now-mannequinned friends cry silently as the three teenagers explain that the crack in the floor allowed them to escape their cold, lonely graves at the bottom of the Mournful Swamp, and somehow by turning teenagers into mannequins they’re stealing their lives back. Um, what? How? What?
Robin persuades them to take her outside where she’ll get them a car so they can…no, let me quote it:
“I know where there’s a car,” I said. “You could cruise. Party. Really live again the way you want to.”
“Where?” The boy looked eagerly around.
I hesitated. I couldn’t tell them about the one car left in the parking lot. They might go after it themselves and leave me here, after they’d transformed me into a plastic dummy. But if I could persuade them to open the door and follow me, maybe I could get away from them. Run for my life!
pp. 118-119
So these ghosts know how to steal the lifeforce from kids by transforming them into mannequins, but they don’t know that cars are in the parking lot and not inside the mall?
So they go outside and Robin tries to run for it, but the ghosts catch her. Except now they look old and rotten, and they abruptly leave her and hurry back to the mall, because they’re too far away from it and their life force is dwindling. They crumble to ash at the doors of the mall, before they can make their way inside.
A whole bunch of kids come pouring out of the mall, and none of them (including Robin’s friends) remember anything about what happened.
Final Thoughts: It’s hard to believe this insane creepiness was created and written by Betsy Haynes, but I guess she had a dark side of which I was previously unaware. It’s like the evil twin of a candy-pink preteen novel.
This felt more like a fever dream than a novel with a coherent plot, but it’s definitely worth owning and reading.
The Mummy Reads 