Articles Available Online

Fire has started in Flat 4 of Paradise Block The young girl in Alice Ash’s story ‘Eggs’ watches with her mother, younger brother, and neighbour Min from outside the building ‘The smoke,’ she tells us, ‘pours out from our downstairs window like a black tongue’ It stains the rooms of Flat 4, and dresses absorb the smell until they are hung outside to ‘shriek around like ghosts on the washing line’ The narrator’s mother had been crying long before the fire started, but in its aftermath she becomes increasingly distressed: she screams ‘head back, mouth open’; a few days later, she muffles her cries ‘with a toy bird stuffed in her mouth’ Left to take care of her brother like a mother might, the narrator’s health begins to deteriorate She is seized by illness, ‘a white spool of pain’ unknotting inside her spine   In Ash’s mesmerising debut collection Paradise Block (2021), everything is susceptible to decay Housing displays symptoms of deterioration through institutional neglect, tenants suffer symptoms of infection and illness, class shame corrodes moments of pleasure There is rot beneath the surface; its exposure is gradual, and darkly compelling ‘I realise that this is something from inside,’ the narrator of ‘Eggs’ tells us, ‘something coming to the surface’ The thirteen stories in the book are intricately interconnected The majority of the characters live, like the narrator of ‘Eggs’, in the dilapidated building of the title, located in a town named Clutter; others live in the wealthier area of Plum Regis in ‘fancy’ semi-detached houses Ash’s fictional landscape closely resembles a number of UK coastal towns, such as Poole, where rich and poor neighbourhoods exist in close proximity, and yet are home to vastly different lifestyles and opportunities In Paradise Block, that landscape is made subtly surreal: a sea god lingers by the beach; residents’ shadows reside in the Lilybank River Many of the recurring locations in Paradise Block are also familiar locales of the deprived coastal town: The Brass Cross pub, the Clutter and Plum Regis department stores, the corner shop   Paradise Block itself is ‘built very cheaply, with windows