Mall Purchase Night by Rick Cook

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.