I've been aware of Lisa Change for some time now, since she's one of the more prolific authors in the self-published TG fiction scene. But I love a good transformation story set in the (increasingly anachronistic) environs of a shopping mall, so I gave Mall of Change a shot.
The story follows a southern politician named Roy Anderson who might seem somewhat familiar if you pay attention to political news in the United States. He likes to go to the mall to ogle teenage girls, and as we learn in some flashbacks, sometimes do more than ogle, with deadly results. Because Roy's feelings about teenage girls are complicated; he's attracted to them, but there's a strong, deep undercurrent of loathing for women and teen girls in particular.
Which is what makes the story so interesting when he's transformed into one.
I think it's safe to say that the majority of male-to-female gender transformation fiction features protagonists who, often out of some kind of misogyny—whether it's the immature "girls are icky" or the chauvinistic "women are inferior"—are unhappy about becoming women. But in my experience, it's rarely the kind of overt misogyny we get from Roy's internal monologue. He's a thoroughly awful character.
And as a result, it's satisfying to see the changes he goes through as a kind of body horror rather than the usual titillation. It's satisfying for things to happen to him that might break stories that weren't about punishing such terrible behavior.
It's hard to call this story fun, but it is nice to see some supernatural comeuppance to a very real-world kind of creep, and to believe even for a moment in a sense of cosmic justice. It's a short, easy read, and the subject matter means it stays pretty PG-13 in terms of content. It's available on Amazon as a single book, or as part of an anthology called Trapped as a Beautiful Girl. Other works by Lisa Change are also available on Smashwords.
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