When a megacorp tries to buy an eerie old cinema – things get weird
Holly is a haunted young woman who moves to a gloomy town and works as an usher in a cinema. Her co-workers, like her in their twenties, are already bohemian ruins, awash in marijuana, drink and berets; the elderly owner, Iris, is mistaken by the newcomer for a tramp. But while Holly is lured into their decadent lives, and the mysterious depths of the cinema –called Paradise – a corporate chain is eyeing them up. Their defences wane; the staff grow stranger; Death begins stalking the corridors.
Children of Paradise is the eerie debut of Camilla Grudova, a Canadian living in Edinburgh, where she worked for while as an usher at the Cameo Picturehouse, loved by locals but prey to developers. You might call this novel “autofiction”, then – our narrator says “call me Holly”, as if casting herself in a role – but the Paradise is untethered to the world beyond. It festers in glorious style, harbouring secrets both old and new. (Among these is a rumoured “secret screen”, reached best in hallucinations.)
Each chapter is named for a classic film, from Rosemary’s Baby to La Bête Humaine; this catalogic structure, and the hazier patches in Holly’s telling – alcoholic, gothic or both – allow Children of Paradise to glide between straight fiction and (as they say) a “love-letter to cinema”. When Grudova dwells on the repetitive vices of people falling apart, you miss the peculiar tensions of The Doll’s Alphabet, her 2017 short-story collection, which remains the disturbing high-point of the recent “weird story” wave. But there’s nothing vanilla in the dark of the Paradise, and even when the corporate takeover comes, complete with managerial drone, it all feels smooth and unearthly – an allegory for lost stories, youth and time.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova is published by Atlantic at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
