Pleasure Beach
£12.00
Helen Palmer
Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.
Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.
‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen Hatherley
Description
Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.
Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.
‘Pleasure Beach does for neon lycra cycling shorts, Nik Naks, and acid trips what Ulysses did for lemon soap: it kaleidoscopes the everyday in a way that remakes the world by recording the bits of it that all too often slip out of view of the literary. 1999 is right before your eyes reading this novel, and Helen Palmer is Blackpool’s incomparable archivist. A social history of fun’s commodification and excess, an intellectual ride, a real queer pleasure. ’ – H. Gareth Gavin
‘A book as mind-bending as the town itself.’ – Jeremy Deller
‘Strap in for a heady rollercoaster ride where stream of consciousness, littered with song lyrics, fuses and fractures into a play script and concrete poetry to create a new language. Immediate. Visceral. Anarchic. Enticing. The magical mundane spirals into sensory overload until you feel you’ve actually spent a weekend at Blackpool sea front. With echoes of Kathy Acker and Ann Quinn, Helen Palmer has the voice of a free spirited writer unafraid to speak their truth.’ – Patrick Jones
‘In Pleasure Beach twenty-four hours becomes a feminist epic, a compulsive and convulsive kind of ecstasy that makes myth of Blackpool and young women. The “we” of the novel feels like a chorus – an “us” – hurtling through the same day and night as Olga, Rachel and Treesa, where time warps and extends around the momentum of falling in love. Walking a tightrope between the metaphor and the real, Palmer writes against humans as symbolic figures, collapsing together the internal and the external so that there is a kind of unreal-real rawness throughout. The intimacy of Pleasure Beach raves through the text, critiquing patriarchy and capitalism with a structure and style that upends and overturns, a tumult of fixation and energy. The novel is electrifying while redefining what the electric could be.’ – Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen Hatherley
Listen to Helen Palmer talking about the writing of the novel:
Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach is her first novel.
Read a sample:
Serialised in four instalments (to conclude with its publication on 16 June 16th 2023), and read by the author, Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) was produced by Dominic Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for Resonance Extra as a part of a rolling series of collaborative broadcasts from Tenement Press and Prototype, Railroad Flat Radio.
