Kate Black

A phenomenology of the If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living? In less than a century, the shopping mall has morphed from a blueprint for a socialist utopia to something else a home to disaffected mallrats and depressed zoo animals, a sensory overload and consumerist trap. Kate Black grew up in North America's largest West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids. It’s the site of a notoriously lethal rave for teenagers, a fatal rollercoaster accident, and more than one gun-range suicide; it’s where oil field workers reap the social mobility of a boom-and-bust economy, the impossibly large structure where teens attempt to invent themselves in dark Hollister sales racks and weird horny escapades in the indoor waterpark. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Can malls tell us something important about who we are? Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming-of-age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. Ultimately, a close look at the mall reveals clues to how a good life in these times is possible.

There is change in the air that starts from one spark and ends with death. Seventeen-year-old Kassie Chadwick’s life is changing. She is becoming who she was destined to be. A mongrel. The next guardian of a rumored haunted woods. She will lose everything important to her in order to find the truth of what she is and how to save the loved ones left in her life. Darkness will follow her until she has no other choice but to go into the infamous area and destroy what is trying to destroy her and others. She will be forced into THE GROVE. Will you follow?