Camilla Grudova’s debut, the short fiction collection The Doll’s Alphabet, was acclaimed as feminist horror reminiscent of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. In 13 often jarringly grotesque stories, Grudova built miniature scenarios to explore the disappointments of young women’s lives: dystopian worlds studded with double meanings and symbolic objects such as inscrutable dolls, mannequin parts and sewing machines. With slyly rococo titles such as Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead and The Moth Emporium, it was as if the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington had undertaken a collaboration with David Lynch.
Grudova’s themes of identity and isolation continue on a larger scale in her first novel, set in an old cinema called the Paradise. It is “a Frankenstein’s monster of a place”, with a trapdoor casually opening on to a river of raw sewage below, and a mysterious red screening room which manifests in hallucinatory fashion from time to time, and from which no one who enters emerges again. With its replica title, the novel is also a dark reflection of Marcel Carné’s classic 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis, and similarly features a cast of misfits, although Grudova makes clear from her characters’ bizarre and frequently sadomasochistic interactions that Carné’s vision of doomed epic romance is very much not on the cards.
