Dark Horse Comics brings you an abandoned mall in the middle of nowhere where every other place inside is haunted which becomes a survival of the fittest for the teens in Death Mall the graphic novel. So if you’re interested in another horror story that takes place inside an abandoned mall, then this is for you. This comic makes you feel like you’re watching another episode of the third season of Stranger Things where most of the teens are killing a monster from hell. However, this comic is all about survival, because it’s about some kids who plan to sneak inside of the abandoned mall before it’s gone. But here’s the real kicker, that mall had been closed for years until monsters are crawling around the mall like insects. This comic is written by Adam Cesare and illustrated by David Stoll. Adam is an American novelist who wrote several horror novels and short stories such as “Clown in a Cornfield”, “Video Night”, and this one. And David is a Denver-based comic artist who worked for Mad Cave, Image, and Webtoon where he actually published a Webtoon Original called “Metaphorical Her” which means, I better check it out for later after Marionetta and see if that piece of Hooky intrigues me.
The front cover shows something that would disturb you. Here we have some mannequins standing around when David breaks the fourth wall just to add some teeth on the upper side of the cover. And somehow, he adds some acrylic paint to color the mannequins with a grayish color on the cover while he focused on coloring the teeth with red and white. Well, there’s not much more to say for this cover because from what I see, this almost looks like an actual novel by Adam Cesare. And if the front cover is not enough to look at, then at the back cover, there’s a quote by Clive Barker who made such an interesting reaction to this comic, he wrote: “An author who knows how to make us afraid.” Oooohhh that’s scary. Do you think I get scared over something like that, well no because I’m actually used to reading some comics on Image that focus on violence and gore.
The story starts when the narration went into everyone’s heads when the mall was flocked by hundreds of people to go shopping in 1964. As the narration keeps going, the kids are breaking into the mall by using a hammer to get the wooden plank out of the way. And all they do is explore the abandoned mall to fool around until someone saws a creepy monster which he saw on his phone after taking some pictures. But what’s really weird is that the mall itself is alive, because after he was scared shitless, they noticed that the lights went back on and the gate on that shop is closing at lightning speed. After that one of the kids got teleported and thought that this whole place is an illusion or something because from what I see is that something is controlling the whole place like it was a device or something. That is until another kid tries to run away, but his fingers got cut off with some scissors by a monster.
At the moment when I turned a few pages of the comic, this comic is becoming a drug-fueled dream like one of the kids had turned against the other because he was using a samurai sword to cut off the dolls and then transformed into a monster, and another one who got a makeover and turned into some freakshow from a Mexican holiday which is the day of the dead. Everything is in chaos inside that mall because there’s an evil that resides there, but no one knows where that comes from. One of the kids named Beth survived hell after she climbed up to the roof, and some construction crew are starting to wreck the whole building. But what will happen next and where are the rest of the kids at?
The comic is very eerie, even though this is a horror story of a haunted abandoned mall. And somehow it’s much more intimidating than any other comic I’ve ever read. Because that mall is like the eclipse thing from Berserk when Griffith uses the crimson Behelit to summon the god hand, and I have already seen how terrifying that was when the Band of The Hawk was brutally murdered by a horde of monsters, not to mention Guts loses his arm and his eye while Demon Griffith was raping Casca. This comic has a lot of things but seeing the most supernatural inside the mall is actually a home for demons.
There’s a whole map of the mall at the end of the book showing the whole directory and the improvements that they made starting from the 1970s to the 2000s. And this whole 3D design of the mall almost looks like a poor design that came from a failed 32-bit game console. But that doesn’t stop there, because I haven’t talked about the art yet. The first thing when I get to see the art in this book, the characters looked more in-depth because their interactions were normal to negative emotions because the main characters were scared as shit.
Now these monster designs like the trenchcoat guy inside the mall are too random and intimidating as it gets because when one of the characters started to transform into demons, it’s even more disturbing as I saw of this whole comic. One of the characters just turned into a demon with sharp knives, that freakshow from what I said above, and one of them turned into a string monster. It’s hard to explain, but I guess that some people inside of that abandoned mall had lost their lives and turned them into monsters just to take another victim to be traumatized and die. The comic is really freaky, but it gets a sense of horror when you see it. If you ever want to read another horror story about something that disturbing like inside a mall, then this is for you.
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