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Mall Purchase Night
Andy Westin, the new security guard at Black Oak Mall, has no idea that the mall is built on a gateway between Elfland and Earth and that a long-standing conflict may threaten innocent shoppers. Original.
352 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
4 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Rick Cook
34 books81 followersRick Cook is a journalist, computer hacker, and fantasy author best known for his "Wiz" series of books. Since his hospitalization in 2000 he has not resumed fiction writing.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 13, 2009
I've wanted to read this book for years, having enjoyed the Wizardry stuff considerably. It was never a local staple, though, so I'm glad to have had the opportunity.
"Y'all know them rats folks have been complaining about? Well, it seems like the suckers have learned to skateboard."
The story is, from start to finish, quite amusing. Not, perhaps, in a laugh-out-loud kind of a way, but lightly funny, all the way through. It combines this fantasy elf motif with the modern day influences of people and their modern forms of corruption to a truly witty end.
"Some red and blue dude is, like, demolishing a Porsche with a crowbar." Slick considered. "Most atypical."
The characters are clearly knock-downs and the mode of speech of some is almost pricelessly hippy-retro. yet the lead character has a good heart which makes things fall neatly into place.
"Excuse me, officer, did you see a red-headed midget in knee breeches and a vest come this way?"
All of the characters are rather odd, yet I'd never have pegged a shopping mall as the nexus for any of this freaky stuff. it's hard to give a coherent picture of such an odd novel, it really is. if you like a bit of light modern-day fantastical fantasy with a sprinkling of stereotypes, in-jokes and humour, go for it.
"Y'all know them rats folks have been complaining about? Well, it seems like the suckers have learned to skateboard."
The story is, from start to finish, quite amusing. Not, perhaps, in a laugh-out-loud kind of a way, but lightly funny, all the way through. It combines this fantasy elf motif with the modern day influences of people and their modern forms of corruption to a truly witty end.
"Some red and blue dude is, like, demolishing a Porsche with a crowbar." Slick considered. "Most atypical."
The characters are clearly knock-downs and the mode of speech of some is almost pricelessly hippy-retro. yet the lead character has a good heart which makes things fall neatly into place.
"Excuse me, officer, did you see a red-headed midget in knee breeches and a vest come this way?"
All of the characters are rather odd, yet I'd never have pegged a shopping mall as the nexus for any of this freaky stuff. it's hard to give a coherent picture of such an odd novel, it really is. if you like a bit of light modern-day fantastical fantasy with a sprinkling of stereotypes, in-jokes and humour, go for it.
August 14, 2012
I found it hysterical that the back cover info was incorrect, as compared to the actual book. However, I'm told that no one else would ever notice that! This book was good: funny, entertaining, and generally a good read.
Read
October 27, 2022In the podcast episode we did on Mall Purchase Night, I noted the weird way it came to my attention: when author Rick Cook died in January 2022, one of his death notices included a synopsis of it, which was similar to an idea I was kicking around (over a decade ago) about a big box store that was also a gateway to Hell. (Hey, no one’s ever accused me of being subtle in my writing.)
And as near as I can tell, that may be the only way anyone has ever stumbled across this book. An exhaustive Google search turned up exactly one contemporary review (Science Fiction Chronicle, Volume 15, Issue 4, 1994), and a single 1997 mention on the book forum of a senior-oriented website.
Heck, even the author’s website doesn’t list this book.
Now I would love to tell you that Mall Purchase Night is a forgotten masterpiece; failing that, I would love to tell you that this one book sums up the early ‘90s zeitgeist and is the only book you need to read to understand that time.
(Or, failing all that, I’d love to tell you that this book doesn’t exist, and that this copy came into my hands after tumbling through some gateway from another realm, because our consensus reality is breaking down. Which we all suspect, but it’s nice to get confirmation.)
Instead I am here to tell you that this book is a little odd.
Sure, it’s also a little of its time (there’s a plot thread here about selling the mall to a Japanese company, and this was published a year after Michael Crichten’s defined the new racist panic over Japan in Rising Sun), but mostly my experience of it was just… odd.
If you went into this book with just the cover (a security guard maybe about to shoot an otherworldly woman) and the premise that’s repeated in all the “New Books” sections I read trying to find that one single review (“Andy Westlin gets a job at a mall which is also a portal to fairy”), you might imagine something like this: a war in Fairy between the Seelie and Unseelie courts spills out into the regular world, charming humans and turning them into unwitting dupes. And that story is here.
It’s about 30 pages or so of this 330 page book.
I would totally read and enjoy that book--particularly if it turned out that guard Andy was also an avatar of some Arthurian figure. The book that I’m less sure of is this one right in front of me, which is a collection of plots all revolving around Black Oak Mall, many of which only lightly touch on the fairy shenanigans. These plots include:
The owner of the mall trying to sell it to a Japanese company in order to fund his political ambitions;
A street-level drug dealer who works out of the mall pushing a new designer drug that, in one case, causes someone to flip out and go play in the highway; he also gets in trouble with his boss for cutting the product; and he also wants to kill Andy Westlin;
An abused girl finding a mentor, briefly, before being confronted with the fact that she’s not a kidnap victim–it’s just that her divorced dad doesn’t want to see her;
Skaters that talk like Bill & Ted (I think?) to such a degree that it’s called out (“I didn’t know anyone really talked like that.” “They didn’t until the movie came out.”);
A bunch of security guards planning a big heist;
Various mall employees, including the stuck up mean guy (whose store gets savaged by the fairies); the unhappy ice cream man (who witnesses a small fairy in his chocolate sauce, all so that we can get the pun, “a chocolate-covered brownie”); and the put-upon Latina seamstress who complained to headquarters about her mean boss and now is being punished with impossible tasks (who accidentally leaves her lunch out, leading the fairies to fix all the dresses, in classic fairy tale fashion);
A retired anthropologist studying stories about the weirdness going on at the mall;
An exterminator who thinks he’s dealing with rats and is scared off by the fairies;
A religious zealot who lost his family in a car accident eventually tries to bomb the mall;
A romance plot between security guard Andy – who used to be a cop at a corrupt district but couldn't handle not being able to help people – and a witch-divorcee who runs an occult-type store but approaches things with a business-practical mindset;
Oh, and the mall’s computer system becomes sentient.
I think it’s that last one that kind of broke me. Is the computer’s sentience a side-effect of its proximity to fairy? Or is it just there so that someone can foil the heist that the bad security guards are planning on pinning on Andy? [Editor’s note: and also it’s the 90s?]
But let’s say you cut all that out... what are you left with? There is a through-line here – this isn’t exactly like the movie Slacker (1990), which follows and drops characters just about every five minutes, without any central story--and yet, now that I’ve thought of that film, I can’t quite unsee the comparison: though Mall Purchase Night has a premise (the mall is a portal to fairy) that touches just about every other subplot, you could shuffle and replace those subplots about as easily as you could shuffle and replace any of the scenes in Slacker. (I think. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the movie, and also at least a decade since it was a good portrait of Austin.)
In other words, the “chocolate-covered brownie” pun is the only reason why we’re introduced to the ice-cream shop plot, and if Cook had come up with a different pun, it could’ve easily been a totally different food court plot.
But, even though I found the romance subplot way too chaste, there’s several moments where we get to watch people interact in the mall that feel moving to me. Like: maybe it’s just because I watched season one of Yellowjackets, but I found myself really engaged by the plot here about the abused mallrat who just wants to find a home where she belongs. Which raises another possibility: in the 90s, I might’ve liked a book about a fairy war spilling out into the mall (and also someone is a reborn King Arthur), but in the 2010s, I would love something like a mosaic novel (like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad) where we dip into and out of a bunch of short stories about how people’s lives get touched by this otherworldly strangeness at the mall.
And as near as I can tell, that may be the only way anyone has ever stumbled across this book. An exhaustive Google search turned up exactly one contemporary review (Science Fiction Chronicle, Volume 15, Issue 4, 1994), and a single 1997 mention on the book forum of a senior-oriented website.
Heck, even the author’s website doesn’t list this book.
Now I would love to tell you that Mall Purchase Night is a forgotten masterpiece; failing that, I would love to tell you that this one book sums up the early ‘90s zeitgeist and is the only book you need to read to understand that time.
(Or, failing all that, I’d love to tell you that this book doesn’t exist, and that this copy came into my hands after tumbling through some gateway from another realm, because our consensus reality is breaking down. Which we all suspect, but it’s nice to get confirmation.)
Instead I am here to tell you that this book is a little odd.
Sure, it’s also a little of its time (there’s a plot thread here about selling the mall to a Japanese company, and this was published a year after Michael Crichten’s defined the new racist panic over Japan in Rising Sun), but mostly my experience of it was just… odd.
If you went into this book with just the cover (a security guard maybe about to shoot an otherworldly woman) and the premise that’s repeated in all the “New Books” sections I read trying to find that one single review (“Andy Westlin gets a job at a mall which is also a portal to fairy”), you might imagine something like this: a war in Fairy between the Seelie and Unseelie courts spills out into the regular world, charming humans and turning them into unwitting dupes. And that story is here.
It’s about 30 pages or so of this 330 page book.
I would totally read and enjoy that book--particularly if it turned out that guard Andy was also an avatar of some Arthurian figure. The book that I’m less sure of is this one right in front of me, which is a collection of plots all revolving around Black Oak Mall, many of which only lightly touch on the fairy shenanigans. These plots include:
The owner of the mall trying to sell it to a Japanese company in order to fund his political ambitions;
A street-level drug dealer who works out of the mall pushing a new designer drug that, in one case, causes someone to flip out and go play in the highway; he also gets in trouble with his boss for cutting the product; and he also wants to kill Andy Westlin;
An abused girl finding a mentor, briefly, before being confronted with the fact that she’s not a kidnap victim–it’s just that her divorced dad doesn’t want to see her;
Skaters that talk like Bill & Ted (I think?) to such a degree that it’s called out (“I didn’t know anyone really talked like that.” “They didn’t until the movie came out.”);
A bunch of security guards planning a big heist;
Various mall employees, including the stuck up mean guy (whose store gets savaged by the fairies); the unhappy ice cream man (who witnesses a small fairy in his chocolate sauce, all so that we can get the pun, “a chocolate-covered brownie”); and the put-upon Latina seamstress who complained to headquarters about her mean boss and now is being punished with impossible tasks (who accidentally leaves her lunch out, leading the fairies to fix all the dresses, in classic fairy tale fashion);
A retired anthropologist studying stories about the weirdness going on at the mall;
An exterminator who thinks he’s dealing with rats and is scared off by the fairies;
A religious zealot who lost his family in a car accident eventually tries to bomb the mall;
A romance plot between security guard Andy – who used to be a cop at a corrupt district but couldn't handle not being able to help people – and a witch-divorcee who runs an occult-type store but approaches things with a business-practical mindset;
Oh, and the mall’s computer system becomes sentient.
I think it’s that last one that kind of broke me. Is the computer’s sentience a side-effect of its proximity to fairy? Or is it just there so that someone can foil the heist that the bad security guards are planning on pinning on Andy? [Editor’s note: and also it’s the 90s?]
But let’s say you cut all that out... what are you left with? There is a through-line here – this isn’t exactly like the movie Slacker (1990), which follows and drops characters just about every five minutes, without any central story--and yet, now that I’ve thought of that film, I can’t quite unsee the comparison: though Mall Purchase Night has a premise (the mall is a portal to fairy) that touches just about every other subplot, you could shuffle and replace those subplots about as easily as you could shuffle and replace any of the scenes in Slacker. (I think. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the movie, and also at least a decade since it was a good portrait of Austin.)
In other words, the “chocolate-covered brownie” pun is the only reason why we’re introduced to the ice-cream shop plot, and if Cook had come up with a different pun, it could’ve easily been a totally different food court plot.
But, even though I found the romance subplot way too chaste, there’s several moments where we get to watch people interact in the mall that feel moving to me. Like: maybe it’s just because I watched season one of Yellowjackets, but I found myself really engaged by the plot here about the abused mallrat who just wants to find a home where she belongs. Which raises another possibility: in the 90s, I might’ve liked a book about a fairy war spilling out into the mall (and also someone is a reborn King Arthur), but in the 2010s, I would love something like a mosaic novel (like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad) where we dip into and out of a bunch of short stories about how people’s lives get touched by this otherworldly strangeness at the mall.
February 28, 2021
Mall Purchase Night, by Rick Cook, is one of those unremarkable novels that you run into all too often. There's nothing really wrong with the book, other than just being a rehash of all the "There are Elves among us" books that have inundated the bookshelves at B Dalton and Waldenbooks, etc. over the last five or six years.
The title appears to be a pun upon Walpurgis Night, which is one of those times when the beasties are let loose until dawn upon the world. Unfortunately, in Cook's novel, the beasties are loose in the shopping mall every night for weeks, searching for a lost talisman. The only other play upon words that I found to be entertaining in this book was the time when a small magical critter gets caught in one of the containers of topping in an ice cream shop and as it escapes across the counter, the owner asks "What was that?", and the soda jerk replies "A chocolate covered brownie."
And that's about as exciting as it gets, with a cast of stereotypical characters, from the gnarly skateboarders to the violent drug lords, the greedy developers, and a hero who manages to do something vaguely brave every so often by mistake, but otherwise drifts aimlessly for three hundred and thirty six pages until the lost talisman, which was there all the time on his girlfriend's necklace, is returned to the faerie realm.
If you're really bored at the airport or bus terminal some time, this one might take your mind off your misery for a bit.
The title appears to be a pun upon Walpurgis Night, which is one of those times when the beasties are let loose until dawn upon the world. Unfortunately, in Cook's novel, the beasties are loose in the shopping mall every night for weeks, searching for a lost talisman. The only other play upon words that I found to be entertaining in this book was the time when a small magical critter gets caught in one of the containers of topping in an ice cream shop and as it escapes across the counter, the owner asks "What was that?", and the soda jerk replies "A chocolate covered brownie."
And that's about as exciting as it gets, with a cast of stereotypical characters, from the gnarly skateboarders to the violent drug lords, the greedy developers, and a hero who manages to do something vaguely brave every so often by mistake, but otherwise drifts aimlessly for three hundred and thirty six pages until the lost talisman, which was there all the time on his girlfriend's necklace, is returned to the faerie realm.
If you're really bored at the airport or bus terminal some time, this one might take your mind off your misery for a bit.
March 22, 2024
I read this several years ago and though I did not keep the book I am glad I at least gave it a read. At the time I was exploring as much off-the-wall fantasy and sci-fi published by Baen Books as I could find, given their publishing books like the Chicks in Chainmail series, Witch Way to the Mall, a few of Spider Robinson's Callahan series, etc.
Problem was more me than the book I think, and some misleading marketing and titling, as I went in expecting a comedy based on the title and the premise. Instead I got "light fantasy", which I guess means some humor but mostly a serious tale but with a gentler tone and familiar if not cozy settings and trappings, and I was really hoping for something that would make me laugh a lot. It's not a bad book, and I do recommend checking it out, just know that the story of the book is nowhere near as laughable or ludicrously-treated as its punny title and premise sound.
Problem was more me than the book I think, and some misleading marketing and titling, as I went in expecting a comedy based on the title and the premise. Instead I got "light fantasy", which I guess means some humor but mostly a serious tale but with a gentler tone and familiar if not cozy settings and trappings, and I was really hoping for something that would make me laugh a lot. It's not a bad book, and I do recommend checking it out, just know that the story of the book is nowhere near as laughable or ludicrously-treated as its punny title and premise sound.
December 19, 2017
This is a light and humorous story I had read once before when it was first published. It's a relatively satisfying feel-good tale, but I'm not sure why I kept the book all these years.
February 25, 2018
Not a bad story, but not enough of the elves, or the other world creatures.
December 16, 2019
Bought this as e-book from Baen . Have read it several times. Enjoyable, good easy read. Recommended.
April 16, 2020
The best part was the talking computer kiosk that demanded cookies before it would answer any questions. And all you had to do was type any cookie in and that was enough. Crazy.
October 11, 2010
The back cover blurb is completely misleading. Might actually make a better movie than book. Easy to read, although a bit too subtle at times, and too explicit at others. Not suitable for kids. A "light" read: You can read it as slowly or quickly as you like, and the author does a good job of reminding you who's who in each scene.
December 28, 2014
This book was a fun quick read. A bit of a nostalgia trip, too. Who shops at malls these days? Who prizes a mink coat? Who can retire to a tropical island on $500,000? The book was mentioned in a reader review of Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff, and though I didn't think it was quite as good as the Huff book, I did enjoy it.
August 29, 2007
This is another of my almost guilty pleasures. I love Urban Fantasies done in this style. A bit of light humor. Likeable characters stuck in fantastic situations.
A bit escapist but thats part of why I like them.
A bit escapist but thats part of why I like them.
June 19, 2012
What a fun read.
The characters are a bit flat and many barely qualify as two-dimensional. It seems almost satirical of (what was) modernity. But that's what makes this book so fun.
This is a great palate cleanser after an emotional/overly thought provoking book.
The characters are a bit flat and many barely qualify as two-dimensional. It seems almost satirical of (what was) modernity. But that's what makes this book so fun.
This is a great palate cleanser after an emotional/overly thought provoking book.
October 5, 2007
Decent, but not his best work.
June 4, 2014
a surprisingly well written book full of humorous twists.
June 21, 2024
Fast read. Good story. Not to be taken seriously, just a romp through the mall (of which so few exist today.)
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews