Find a local bookstore. Share This. Pasha Malla. Our Algorithm Recommends. Soft Skull Press. By submitting a comment, you accept that CBC has the right to reproduce and publish that comment in whole or in part, in any manner CBC chooses. Please note that CBC does not endorse the opinions expressed in comments. Comments on this story are moderated according to our Submission Guidelines. Comments are welcome while open.
We reserve the right to close comments at any time. Join the conversation Create account. Already have an account? The Next Chapter Pasha Malla wrote an ode to dying retail spaces with novel Kill the Mall Kill the Mall is a horror-tinged fantasy about what happens when the novel's narrator takes up a residency at a local mall.
And by normal I mean the truth —the normal, quiet truth beneath the clatter of your busy city lives. Though did I achieve such truth this time? I have my doubts. The tone is mocking but also plaintive; an undercurrent of uncertainty has crept in, a sense that none of this is going quite as planned.
These two points are really the same, of course: whenever people get involved with art, things get unpredictable. The characters undergo plenty of revelatory introspection while struggling through the Raven-instigated chaos, though many of their realizations are tragic, and often cost dearly in love, life, or sanity. This dichotomy between safe and disruptive art is, in itself, an argument in favor of difficult or inaccessible writing. That said, the book is far from inaccessible.
Just kidding around. Pearl said, Kellogg, hey, no, I know. They remember in this idealized sort of way. Why is care giving, or duty, so prevalent in your work? When I was writing The Withdrawal Method my step-mom was really sick and my dad just dedicated his life to taking care of her. Not out of obligation—but this is what you do. And, you know, I like that idea.
Struggling with it and whatever else. How men take care of each other and family and friends and everything else. And also how they fail. Even Matt—who is this incredibly destructive force for most of the book—is quite funny. But the way that North American male culture is built, that sadness sharpens into anger very quickly and the way that it manifests outwardly as hostility, violence, anger, aggression, and for the three of those characters.
You know, Matt is physically violent, Ash is linguistically violent. I think it works for something like Blood Meridian , where that tone is crucial to how that book operates, but I wanted for that to be not the dominant strain, but an undercurrent that is inevitable, especially when it rises up and becomes so prevalent.
But I also wanted to turn that into a kind of complicity, where his bumbling is such a symptom of a certain type of privilege.
And that this kind of behavior actually wreaks a lot of havoc. I was also interested in the relationship between Ash and Sherene. You see that Sherene, a woman, is the only place where he can express that longing for intimacy.
Whereas Matt, who is desperate for it from Ash, never gets it from Ash. And they have an intellectual intimacy. And that self-awareness comes through. I remember when you outed Chip and Sherene as being Asian—do you want to talk about that a little bit?
I had a clear idea of who these people were from the beginning and then I was like, why do I need to explain it?
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