‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova     (2022)  –  196 pages

The Paradise is an old movie theater built around the time of the outbreak of the First World War. The young woman Holly is new to this unnamed town, and when she sees a sign at the Paradise on its big dusty doors saying “We’re Hiring” she decides to apply for the job. She has to clean up the spilled popcorn and all the other even more disgusting stuff found on the floors of the theater as well as clean the toilets.

“I guess people found an animalistic pleasure in eating and drinking in the dark, in making a mess, leaving bags, boxes and cans behind.”

There are a lot of gross-out lines in ‘Children of Paradise’ of the toilets getting majorly clogged by movie patrons or disgusting stuff showing up on the theater seats or inside the popcorn machine. These kind of incidents probably happen in a lot of movie theaters but especially at the Paradise.

When Holly meets some of the other employees and regular customers of the Paradise, she finds that they are about as decrepit and spiky as the old theater itself. At first these other characters, the projectionist, the ticket sellers, the ushers avoid her. They are a clique.

However, in time they accept Holly and invite her to home screenings of their favorite movies. All of the offbeat weird employees share one thing in common, a love of the movies.

“They were a necessary evil, customers, so that we, the true devotees, could have access to the screen, our giant godlike monument.”

In time Holly becomes one of them, these strange lovers of movies. “I became a part of the Paradise.”

However, when the Paradise is bought out by the movie theater conglomerate chain CinemaTown, ‘Children of Paradise’ becomes a horror story. First the projectionist is fired, because movie theaters don’t need projectionists anymore. Instead of the older esteemed movies which the Paradise had shown, a steady diet of Marvel Universe superhero movies is brought in, which the former employees of the Paradise cannot tolerate. Things at the theater further deteriorate from there.

I was quite impressed with the author of ‘Children of Paradise’, Camilla Grudova, for setting up the gruesome scenes and characters of this ultimate horror story so vividly. This is her first novel. I will be reading her previous collection of stories ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’ soon.

Grade :   A