The abandoned Rolling Acres Mall on April 1, 2014. Rolling Acres Mall was a retail mall located in the Rolling Acres area of Akron, Ohio. Built in 1975, it was closed in 2008. It is set to be demolished any day now. (Seph Lawless)

They're typically bustling with activity, packed during the holiday shopping season, but the shopping malls in this selection of photos by photographer will be crowd-free this Black Friday, ghostly and eerie as they are left to succumb to Mother Nature.

It doesn’t take long for nature to overtake structures that have been left exposed to the elements. In his bestselling book, The World Without Us, Alan Weisman wrote that structures crumble when weather does unrepaired damage and other life forms, such as insects, birds or mice, create new habitats in the rubble. Without interventions, these buildings could collapse.

The two Ohio shopping malls in this slideshow above — Rolling Acres Mall and Randall Park Mall — were both built in the the mid-1970s and abandoned in 2008 and 2009. Both malls, now overgrown, and littered with broken glass and debris from crumbling walls, are set to be demolished any day now.

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"There's nothing more profound and sobering then being inside an abandoned mall," said Lawless. "It's a powerful symbol of America's economic decline. I used to visit these malls often growing up. I remember eating cotton candy underneath the escalator and the sounds of people laughing and feet shuffling as the gentle sounds of falling water from one of the many fountains surrounded me. This was America."

Lawless' photos of abandoned shopping malls are collected in a new book, .

Lawless is known for exploring abandoned spaces and documenting their imminent collapse. In 2012, he set out across the United States to photograph the "most broken parts of America." He came back with approximately 3,000 images and 17 hours of video footage. This year, Lawless released his book,Autopsy of America,a culmination of that work.

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And while abandoned buildings dot the landscape of America's Rust Belt, photos of these decaying and boarded-up shopping malls, once iconic cultural phenomena, may seem disturbing. But they shouldn't be surprising.About or be converted into non-retail space within the next 10 years, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate and REIT analytics firm, reported Business Insider.

For more on Lawless' work, visit his or follow him on ,and on .