The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper
Last week, I began reading a work that took attention, needed thought, and rewarded same. Then I set it aside and picked up Cooper's novel, instead.
Hey, fatigue had set in and the other book was punishing my daze.
Anyway, in Cooper's novel Teddy is a slacker, but he's a slacker for a special reason: While at college he recognized that there were vampires and he took decisive action. The horror of what happened has stunted and colored his life since, the only positive thing stemming from the incident being his friendship with Laura Harker, whose life he saved. Now Teddy is trying again to pull himself out of his funk, tentatively grabbing onto a job as a barista in a national chain of coffee shops. And that's where things go wrong and he stumbles onto a Lovecraftian plot, a plot Cooper neatly ties into some of Lovecraft's less admirable traits.
I'm not sure I could come up with a better example of what I mean by calling something a good beach-read: it’s undemanding, lays everything out for you on the page, but does so with some intelligence and a bit of wit, though the latter is obscured at times by the novel's more sophomoric humor. Teddy met the vampires in his freshman year and hasn't really developed emotionally much beyond that. This occasionally edges toward annoying, but Cooper (and I wonder if that's a pseudonym since I've heard nothing about this writer since the novel was published a couple of years ago) seems to know when to pull away, either shifting to a different scene or heading off in a different plot direction or deftly altering the emotional landscape of the moment.
And Cooper even goes further, topping off this pastry of a novel with a nice frosting, something very neat and not easy: At one point Cooper, though careful use of language, effectively presents an idea of what it would be like perceptually to live in one of Lovecraft's other dimensions in which geometry does not adhere to our laws and time does not exist.
Not a great novel. Not a great Lovecraftian pastiche. Not a book I'd recommend to everyone. But I walked away entertained and do not feel like I wasted money by taking a chance on it.
Randy M.
