The following essay appeared in the summer 2025 edition of WRITE magazine.
When my daughter and I visited an eerily empty mall when she was a toddler, she did something wonderful: she started joyfully running. Suddenly, the cavernous corridors of the empty mall became a much-needed playground on a rainy day.
Once I caught up with her, we walked hand-in-hand through the hallways of the mall, past the shops and food court restaurants, and alongside the thick maintenance doors that remained firmly shut to the outside world. Many of the stores in this mall sat vacant with yellowing paper covering their windows, so it was no wonder few people were there that day. We were drawn to the indoor space, but as we walked along more and more empty storefronts, I couldn’t shake the feeling that dead malls were creepy.
My first jobs as a teenager, then later as a university student, were in malls and they’re spine-tingling places after hours. Loading bays with janky doors, dark and windy maintenance routes, shadowy corridors, and, yes, small furry creatures scurrying about. I worked at sporting goods stores and home stores, and I remember the chill that ran down my spine as I walked alone through the parking lot each night to toss the garbage in the dumpster and how the rattle of the heavy lid slamming down echoed through the darkness.
While my daughter and I wandered, the dead mall as a mysterious setting got my imagination going. Was the fading mall with a high vacancy rate kind of gothic?
An old castle or a crumbling mansion. A woman in distress. A paranormal vision (or two), and the dangerous secret shrouding the mystery behind it all. The elements of a gothic story have haunted the pages of novels for hundreds of years.
Could a mall become one of those elements too?
When I set out to write my debut novel, The Very Good Best Friend, the dead mall became more than just the chilling contemporary gothic setting for Carolyn’s journey from uptown New Westminster to an imagined town in the East Kootenays called Valley Falls. I began to see how the mall was not only a setting I found engaging but a vehicle to explore themes of generational wealth, grief, family history, and friendship. The abandoned mall Carolyn is searching for has been reborn as a mysterious intentional community run by a billionaire where all community members have the gift of student loan forgiveness. The catch is, they must work at this hidden mall under mysterious circumstances and go no-contact with all outsiders.
Along the way, Carolyn is confronted by ghosts of her own that she must face to make way for her growth. When she begins seeing something important from her past, she presses through the vision to focus on finding her friend. However, she can’t run from what she’s seeing, no matter how many crumbling mall corridors she passes through.
It wasn’t until the second or third draft that I even realized I was writing a contemporary gothic novel. Those first drafts were about getting the journey down on paper and the traces of a story arc. My more tactile memories of the mall all added to the atmosphere of the setting as I wrote: windy maintenance routes that were easy to get lost in, huge, wrap-around parking lots that went on and on, and the tacky mall décor that was always covered in dust. These details added the texture and nuance I needed to make Carolyn’s exploration of the mall authentic and spooky. Animals lurk in the rafters and decades old food court menus untouched by inflation litter the floors.
Even though I found old dead malls creepy, remembering the joy of my daughter running and using the empty space of the mall stayed with me as I wrote. If an empty mall could be a modern day stand in for a haunted castle in a contemporary gothic, then maybe it could also be something else, something more, and that “something” is what I set out to discover in The Very Good Best Friend.
