When a dancing mob feeds a woman to the food court escalator, security guard Shaw Price knows he is in for the worst shift of his life. Visitors speak in tongues. Somewhere in the building, a man has been scalped by a floor polisher. The security cameras have gone rogue, and strange, small objects reject visual perception.
But Shaw can’t focus beyond the insatiable hunger driving him mad. While he could blame it on a late coming-of-age, the last time he checked, visions of his supervisor gloating over the bodies of missing girls isn’t exactly a common side-effect of teenage hormones.
And then there’s the whole thing about the mall maybe being alive.
MONITORED ACTIVITY is a queer, sci-fi horror novella set in the early 2000s. Perfect for fans of THE BACKROOMS and digital indie horror.
I’m not familiar with the sprawling American malls of Mitch Miller’s new queer horror novella, Monitored Activity, other than through the depictions of various media such as The Simpsons. But I did grow up as a 90’s kid in a city that had two shopping centres, which was the closet thing to a mall. Wandering those halls and meandering past the variety of stores was sometimes a disconcerting experience. There were dark corners and spaces shoppers couldn’t venture, but you just knew they were hiding secrets. And even back then, these shopping centres had their own strange quirks. My local one had an indoor water fountain with an over-the-top clockwork chime that would perform a whole musical routine at certain hours.
These shopping centres were a whole microcosm of their own, a dark universe meant to mask their deeper, more sinister nature (and what could be more sinister than capitalism!), and it’s no wonder they’ve inspired horrors such as The Backrooms, and of course, this delightfully dark novella.
Monitored Activity, then, is the story of Shaw Price, a young trans man who works for security in a shopping mall during the early 2000s and is responsible for keeping an eye on the monitors via security cameras dotted throughout the mall. He also has a crush on his boss. But as soon as his shift starts, a gruesome accident happens involving a woman being fed to an escalator at the food court (remember food courts?) and that’s just the beginning of the bizarre happenings that takes over Shaw.
As he goes about his shift and tries to document the facts of the accident, he’s overcome with violent images, strange hallucinations of missing girls, a sexual hunger bordering a raw reawakening, and other oddities that make him question his sanity and the actions of his boss. It’s all written from Shaw’s eyes in a literary style that does not shy from detail. This is a story that paints the dirty reality of life working in a mall, and introduces us to a range of characters you’d certainly find within one. It’s also a story that explores body horror and sexuality bordering on erotica. It’s very adult, it’s violent, and it’s not for the squeamish. It’s also wonderfully queer, and queer horror is definitely becoming my favourite type of horror!
As you’d find with a horror story, there’s an element of mystery woven throughout as Shaw – and the reader – tries to make sense of these supernatural happenings and what’s really going on in this fucked up mall. My only criticism is that while we reach a satisfying reveal, the story ends a little too abruptly for my tastes, though the author teases more stories of multi-media classic internet horror to come.
Final Words
Monitored Activity is an adult queer horror novella for anyone who’s ever found shopping malls deeply uncomfortable on a existential level.
