Book Review: The Menstruating Mall [Carlton Mellick III]

RATING: Good, but ending made me go "Huh?" 0_0

Great book cover

Razor wire pubic hair. Baby Jesus butt plugs. Bleeding malls, Satanic burgers. Welcome to the world of Carlton Mellick III, to the Bizarro genre, where stereotypes are shunned and freakish is the order of the day.

Ironically, Bizarro itself is becoming a stereotype nowadays.

But I digress... or perhaps not.

Anyway, I found Carlton Mellick III’s “The Menstruating Mall” to be… quite refreshing. Call it the bread in a wine-tasting session, or the coffee beans before sniffing another perfume. It is certainly something new, although definitely an acquired taste.

Our narrator is the typical yuppie guy who buys everything that makes it into the magazines he reads, watches blockbusters, and likes everything that’s “mass culture”. He goes to the mall one day, and finds that he can’t leave. The mall is suddenly vacated, starts bleeding, and our guy finds himself trapped inside the mall with nine other ridiculously stereotypical characters: the blond cheerleader, the white gangsta boy, the redneck cowboy, the too-male jock, a Goth girl, a bible thumper, a Stepford wife, a senile retiree and the gamer geek. There’s nothing stopping them from leaving – they just can’t leave.

Someone begins killing off our little motley crew one by one, Agatha Christie style. In a race against time, our heroes try to find out what the killer wants, and who the killer is.

In the meantime, things in the mall just keep getting weirder and weirder.

One thing that kept me turning the pages was because I wanted to find out who did it, and why. However, the ending was just simply anticlimactic. I was like, “What the hell has that got to do with the rest of the story?!” when I reached the end of what seemed like roughly 150 pages in size 14 font. (Yep, it’s an uber-short read.) While you will find out who the killer was and what the motive was, the last few chapters just went totally *shwing* off the top.

Oh, and no matter what I do, I COULD NOT appreciate the much-praised illustrations (which looks more like high-school male toilet humor graffiti) in the book.

However, the book is not without merits. I did enjoy this book. Well, three-fourths of it anyway. There are scenes that had me laughing out loud, simply because they were just so ridiculous. There are also scenes that were so repulsive, I couldn't help but be fascinated.

On another level, the author tries to tackle issues about society and conformity, and how consumerism (a.k.a. the horrifying taste of the general public) plays a big part in it. This book is Carlton Mellick III’s effort in promoting the elusive, multi-faceted concept of unique individuality. In other words, stop taking yourself too seriously before you begin, as Spyder puts it, “…[to] seem like [a] badly written B-movie character.” At the end of the day, do whatever you want to do, and to hell with everybody else.

Three stars because I enjoy sarcasm, wit, and a good satire.