Dead Mall by Adam Cesare - Graphic Novel Review

 

Originally published on Set The Tape

Dead Mall, written by Adam Cesare, feels like the kind of story that a group of friends would tell each other whilst gathered around a fire at night in a place that they shouldn’t be in – out in a creepy woods, or exploring some long abandoned building. It’s the kind of twisted tale made to get you looking over your shoulder to make sure that there’s nothing creeping up behind you.

Our story begins as a group of teenage friends break their way into the Penn Mills Galleria, an old shopping mall that’s been left abandoned and alone. Once a thriving heart of the community, it stands quiet and empty – or at least it appears to. As the group of five teens make their way into the old building and begin their night of drinking and fun, an invisible narrator follows their actions, providing a commentary and trying to gain insight onto their personalities. At first you think that it’s someone inside the building watching them, that it’s one of the shadowy figures lurking in the backgrounds of panels, but after a while it becomes clear that the narrator is the mall itself.

It turns out that Dead Mall isn’t a story about something or someone awful lurking inside an old building, but of a building come to life, twisted by bizarre, cosmic powers into a nightmare location. And the teens soon learn this themselves as the building shifts around them, trying to separate them, trying to herd them where it wants. Unfortunately for the teens, the mall is also home to twisted, monstrous creatures that were once lured in like them, now hunting them through the halls and abandoned stores. Now the group will have to try to find a way out before they’re killed, or before they become more of the mall’s residents.

One of the best ways that I can perhaps describe Dead Mall would be the sifting changing reality of a nightmare, mixed with Hellraiser. Instead of a puzzle box, however, the mall itself is the conduit, the thing that summons nightmarish beings, and transforms those it captures. The creatures that inhabit Penn Mills Galleria are very twisted, and some of them could easily be lifted from the page and dropped into a Hellraiser movie with little to no changes to their designs and fit right in. And these similarities mean that the weirdness of the story is easy to digest, because it’s a concept that’s familiar. Getting on board with the concept is done quickly, and you’re then able to delve into the details that make the story its own unique entity.

David Stoll’s artwork for Dead Mall is really superb stuff. For the most part the book feels very normal. The characters have nice clear styles and personalities presented through their looks, the environments feel familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a shopping mall, and everything is neat and tidy. It’s when the building begins to shift and change, moving through the decades, that things begin to feel unsettling, and the first time you see one of the twisted creatures that lives there is a truly shocking moment. The creature designs are a stand out part of the book, with some of them having a very twisted kind of beauty to them.

Dead Mall was a surprisingly fun and twisted read, with a story that wasn’t afraid to take a familiar concept and take it in some interesting new directions and just have a blast doing it. If you’re a fan of bizarre, almost disturbing cosmic style horror there’s going to be a lot to this book that will appeal to you.

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