Cooper, Seamus. The mall of Cthulhu. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2009. 235pp.

Seamus Cooper's The Mall of Cthulhu is a seriously strange and funny book.

Okay, here goes. A decade before the main action, Ted, a regular college kid, saves his lesbian best friend, Laura, from a horde of vampires trying to initiate her into their sorority; he's traumatized by having to massacre the whole nest of vampires (including a recently turned frat friend). Ten years later, she's joined the FBI as an analyst while he's unable to overcome his past and is following her from city to city as her career progresses, all the while working a series of McJobs.

Now, he stumbles on a Lovecraftian conspiracy. A bunch of white supremacists are working to bring the Great Old Ones back from their dimension. Ultimately, Ted and Laura work together along with a shadowy yet underfunded government agency to fight them back.

Light-hearted yet still a bit scary, this is a fantastic first novel. Good adventure, engaging characters, some self-deprecating insights into slacker/nerd culture, more-or-less tight plotting, tons of Lovecraft and other pop culture in-jokes not to mention a whole lot of winking and nudging – this is an entertaining melange. I certainly hope Cooper will bring Ted and Laura back for more supernatural adventures.