Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) # I of IV

Published by Prototype, Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th 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. Serialised in four instalments (to conclude with its publication on June 16th 2023, “Bloomsday”), 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 Publishing, Railroad Flat Radio.

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.

Palmer’s readings are accompanied by found sounds and samples – noise and ambience borrowed from Blackpool’s beaches, streets, and ballrooms – and features refrains drawn from Benedict Drew’s Music for Bookshops.

"A book as mind-bending as the town itself" – Jeremy Deller

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.