Under the Cover: “Retail apocalypse” – On writing The Very Good Best Friend

by Taryn Hubbard

The mystery and local lore of abandoned malls served as the inspiration for my debut novel, The Very Good Best Friend. In recent years, we’ve heard more about shuttered malls, spurred by the so-called retail apocalypse raging across North America, but abandoned malls have haunted the landscape for much longer than that.

A memory from my 1990s childhood includes a neighbourhood mall with a Safeway, a jewelry store, a small clothing store, and many large buckets positioned around the orange-tiled hallways and corridors to collect the rainwater that slipped through the holes in the roof. One afternoon, as my family and I cut through from the main entrance to the other, the mom of a kid I did martial arts with sat on a small stool in the centre playing an acoustic guitar and singing her heartfelt ballads as the line of candy machines with fading jellybeans formed her backdrop. It was the first live music I’d ever seen, and it was mesmerizing. The orange drink machines endlessly circled in the background as the audience members, holding their plastic shopping bags, looked on. A few years later, that mall was closed and left empty for over a decade before it was redeveloped into something like townhouses (probably).

It’s the small talk behind the failed mall that caught my ear, the kind of chit-chat one might hear while sitting in a salon chair on a busy Saturday while getting a haircut. A deal gone bad. Real estate speculation. Tax write-off. Foreign investors. Owners didn’t know what they were doing. Divorce.

The mystery behind an empty mall got me curious. What if something was happening inside those walls and we, the community, just weren’t aware of it because what was going on there wasn’t for us. It was secret.

The mall in The Very Good Best Friend is on the outskirts of a small, failed company town. I imagined that this mall at one time coaxed the business away from the original main street only to peter out itself when Target withdrew from Canada. Carolyn’s best friend has been whisked away to live there in exchange for student loan debt forgiveness. She drives all night looking for this mall because how many could there possibly be in an area with such a small population? She has a harder time finding the site than she expected and teams up with a motivated local journalist who is determined to expose the truth about the community’s founder, a billionaire who claims his generosity has put him on a mission to buy back student loan debt from people who deserve a break and some time away from their regular lives. It sounds good, even admirable. Yet, the founder has built his own community in secret and nothing seems right. Carolyn needs to know if her friend is safe.

Most abandoned malls are lined with blue fencing to keep people out. The mall in The Very Good Best Friend evokes this unsettling detail as well. What Carolyn and the journalist discover inside the fencing is a mall that has been partly taken over by nature, as if it is slowly being reabsorbed back into the ground. Could something sinister really be going on in there? This is a mall visit they will never forget.

While the old malls served as my initial inspiration, it is the relationships that Carolyn has with her friend and her late sister that form the heart of the story. It’s these relationships that marked my heart as a writer and kept me going back to the story, draft after draft, to make sure I got it right.

I started writing this story over the Labour Day weekend in 2020 when my husband and I were the Artists-in-Residence for the City of Maple Ridge. It was spectacularly hot that weekend and the time felt right to bring my ideas to life. As I worked through the drafts, which took several years, I developed paranormal and gothic elements into the style and dug deeper into Carolyn’s feelings about losing her sister when she was just a kid. As the title The Very Good Best Friend alludes to, the story centres about one friend and her physical and emotional journey in this story. The closer Carolyn gets to the mall, the more her sense of reality unravels.

My first book, a poetry collection called Desire Path that Talonbooks published in the winter of 2020, explored the superblocks, gas stations, fast food joints, and flickering flat screen TVs of the suburbs. I see The Very Good Best Friend launching from those pages straight into the macabre of modern life. Why are there so many billionaires again? As I developed the different plots and impulses driving the story, I reflected on the news articles I’d read about the ultra-rich building secret luxury bunkers so they’d have somewhere appropriate to go during an apocalyptic emergency. It got me thinking, how would someone who is so used to getting everything they wanted deal with not being able to get the one thing they needed? The answer to this question formed the mystery behind the mall and the work being done behind its crumbling walls that Carolyn must confront.

The process of writing my first novel was exciting and I’m in the midst of doing it all again with a new story. My hope is that readers of The Very Good Best Friend will enjoy the mystery of the mall and relate to the determination of Carolyn to piece it all together for the sake of knowing her best friend is safe.

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Taryn Hubbard is the author of The Very Good Best Friend, her debut novel from Now or Never Publishing available in April 2025. Her first poetry collection, Desire Path, was published by Talonbooks in 2020, and she will publish a second collection in 2026. She lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia with her family where she is working on another spooky novel. Learn more at tarynhubbard.com.