When a book advertises itself as ‘weird fiction’ it often leads to a set of stories that aim to be odd by including talking dogs, small green men coming down from the sky, or a monster that lives in the attic. As if their whole purpose was to be weird and nothing else. Not so with Paradise Block. In fact, in many of the thirteen stories on offer here, Alice Ash shows such a knack for melding the mad with the mundane that it is hard to believe that this is her debut collection. These tales do such a good job of clawing at your emotional bone, creating characters who you believe in and feel for, that when the weirdness works its way into the story it feels so natural you barely notice it. The weirdness feels like a believable element of the world that she creates.
And that world is a fascinating one. Each story and character is linked, in some way or another, by their own personal connection to Paradise Block, whether they are a resident of one of its homes, they work in one the nearby malls, or they have friends and family that can’t quite escape the place. When some of the more prominent players in the individual stories turn up in another narrative, Ash does a superb job of making those connections real and helping us to see her characters from a whole host of angles. By the time we get to the end we feel we’ve been shown a glimpse of a complex and very real community.
Not, necessarily, one we would want to be a part of, though. From the Robbie Williams obsessive who is neglected by her family in the opening story, to the lonely mail order bride watching her husband slowly die at the end, and via the girl who feels so trapped in her relationship that she spends her savings on a dress she previously owned years before, these are stories of characters on the edge, close to breaking, and sometimes keen to take everyone else down with them.
Despite the fact that you wouldn’t actually want to inhabit the stories yourself, you will definitely want to read them. These are urgent and involving works of short fiction. When I set out to review a set of short stories, I usually mark the bottom corner of the first page of a story that I know I’ll want to highlight. By the time I’d finished Paradise Block there were too many marks for me to mention. But I was particularly affected by ‘Planes’, in which a young Benny writes letters to an absent father as he rails against his mother, always unaware that her lack of presence is because she is doing everything she can to keep him fed and clothed. And in ‘Bad Elastic’, the story of Marie’s desperation to escape battling with her need to cling on is so heartbreaking it had to earn a mention.
Any Cop? Really, I could have picked almost all of the stories as a highlight. It’s a superb collection. What makes it most effective in the end, though, is that the weirdness that takes hold in every story is not based in something otherworldly, but at the edges of our reality and in a place that makes it relatable and believable. These strange stories sing because they feel so close to home.
Fran Slater
Bookmunch 