Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls. Wow, right? I couldn't wait to dig into the nitty gritty details of how things went so wrong for these young women and I was not disappointed. TW: Do you think a social media platform like Tumblr actually helps radicalise young people, and drive them to commit real acts of violence, as it does in Penance ? Eliza Clark’s writing embraces the socially unacceptable and wryly explores themes of gender, power, and violence.”— Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023 After Boy Parts, it is easy to anticipate something exciting from Eliza Clark, and Penance goes in a very different direction, but definitely lived up to my expectations. It is entirely written in true crime framing, with the journalist's book and a follow up interview, and this is very effective in getting across the complexity of true crime and what counts as entertainment, research, and factual content. Carelli's book is a mixture of his descriptions of interviews and research, snippets from podcasts and social media posts, and dramatised sections that describe events as if in a novel or similar, and these all weave together to create this vision of what a writer might want to say about something so sensational. The narrative is so gripping, and Clark's writing adapts to the registers that suit each part, that you feel fully engrossed in the story even as you question why it is being told like this.

Though I think the main issue here is this, the book simply doesn’t know what it’s actually about -which means us (the reader/s) in turn, also don’t know what it’s about. Instead of English, she studied art, first in Newcastle then in London. No good at drawing – or so she felt – and “too shy” (unlike the narrator of Boy Parts) to ask people to pose for photos, she found that what she most enjoyed was writing a dissertation on how Michel Foucault’s ideas of surveillance play out in the online era. By day, she sold posh undies at Agent Provocateur, having previously worked in bars. Returning home on graduation meant pulling pints again (“there’s not a lot of luxury retail where I’m from”), but this time she wasn’t able to blag a drink on shift – a perk she’d enjoyed in London – and the bouncers were useless: “I’d be dead sober, there’d be a man sexually harassing me and my manager would be like, ‘Well, he’s a paying customer.’” EC: Well, I pinched a lot of stuff from Scarborough. My partner lived in Scarborough when he was a teenager, and his parents still live there. So, there are bits and bobs that are pinched from anecdotes and local news stories, like the donkey strangling stuff, that happened in Scarborough.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls. Alongside the crime focus is a detail In this sense, the book is a radical departure from Clark’s 2020 debut, Boy Parts , a hallucinatory story told from the perspective of a young photographer, Irina, whose sense of her own invisibility escalates toward violence. (In 2023, Boy Parts helped land Clark on Granta ’s once-a-decade list of the best young British novelists.) Penance ’s dark humour occupies a similar space, however, as do its keen observations on the edgier niches of internet culture in the mid-2010s, explored in passages that ricochet between the crime itself, the witch-hunting history of Crow, and the precarious landscapes of pre-censorship Tumblr and true crime message boards. It’s really weird and dangerous that a lot of kids have access to adults who are complete strangers. A lot of that has come out in the increase of online radicalisation. I’m friends with a few secondary school teachers, and the amount of damage that young boys having access to Andrew Tate’s rhetoric has done has been really major in the last couple of years. Particularly when teenagers are so impressionable, and malleable, to be given access to a lot of weird adults with strange opinions is maybe not the best thing in the world. I don’t want to do a pearl-clutching, ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children’ kind of thing, but I do think we’ve got this incredibly powerful, society-up-ending tool that we don’t properly know how to use.

When Eliza Clark’s debut novel came out with an indie publisher in 2020, nobody imagined that her second would be among the most eagerly awaited of 2023. Her rise from obscurity to literary celebrity began when fans on TikTok made Boy Parts a cult hit. It was complete when, a few months ago, Granta magazine named the 29-year-old author one of the UK’s best 20 novelists under the age of 40. EC: Very funny. It’s just two very funny words to put together. Actually, it was the donkey strangling that led me to giving the novel this British seaside setting. Also, the guy shooting seagulls with a crossbow, that was Scarborough. Maybe more so because I’d only just read Clark’s incredible Boy Parts last week, so my expectations going in were slighter higher than I thought they would be ? Barry Pierce: I feel Penance is coming out at a perfect time because it feels we are somewhat endlessly in a cycle where people are questioning the ethics of true crime, be it through books or through Netflix series. Was that on your mind when you were writing the book? Sure stylistically speaking, Clark was clearly trying to make a point of blurring (and somewhat pushing the boundaries) of fact and fiction. Yet I think she relied almost too heavily on peoples prior knowledge of all these -frankly jarring, “real life” references. Especially true crime -which is NOT my jam. Also I don’t quite understand the (frankly tenuous) contextual links to the Brexit referendum, which served NO point at all to the plot…For fans of meandering plot, un-engaging and let’s face it, cringeworthy abbreviations (mainly online jargon like ((another word CONSTANTLY used here -I know I sound like a GCSE English teacher, but COME ON)) “fml” “tbh” “irl” “w/e���) as a form of “dialogue” and references to social media trends (which reading in 2023, some have already dated), this book was a HOT MESS -and not the good kind. Once again, Eliza Clark conjures her dark magic to pen something disturbing and addictive.' @mostardentlyalice BP: One aspect of the book I really liked was just how unreliable you made your narrator. The whole thing is basically framed as a work of unethical and biased reporting, which is something you get a lot of with true-crime podcasts. It’s funny that for a genre so focused on investigation and going over every detail, rarely is the lens ever turned on the person writing.

Three girls in a failing seaside town brutally murder a classmate in this (fictional) true-crime exposé. In terms of internet culture, the novel explores how easily the online radicalisation of young, vulnerable people can occur, with fans in online fandom communities like tumblr feeding into each other’s obsession until everything starts to derail – and to what degree onlookers are complicit as they watch it all unfold in real time. Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.” These details – along with the lengthy explanations of Crow’s historic mysticism – feel unwieldy. Witness statements, which sit alongside transcripts of podcast episodes, text conversations and Carelli’s prose, are not always labelled with a character’s name. It can take a few paragraphs to work out who is speaking, and accounts often contradict other characters’ claims. Penance can be difficult to follow and the effect is disconcerting, which, you come to feel, is exactly what Clark wants.TW: Could you tell us a bit about constructing this fictional seaside town in decline, set between real locations on the east coast?

So there were some hits and some misses but in the end I am glad to have taken this twisted journey to the truth....or is it true? You be the judge. 3.5 stars!

Eliza Clark: It was more organic because I’ve been writing the novel for so long that my own opinions have changed alongside the cultural zeitgeist. Especially since we’re now witnessing the Netflixification of true crime. It was one thing when it was a niche community, and it’s another now that it’s this mainstream multi-million-dollar industry. It’s a conversation that I’m glad I’m part of and to a degree the timing is convenient for Penance . But it does also feed into one of the things about true crime that I struggle with the most, especially in podcasts, where the discussion of these cases is broken up with advertising for toothbrushes and mattresses and it’s made very clear that it’s all for profit. So, I guess I feel a bit weird about the convenience of the cultural discussion for me and Penance . But who knows, maybe the novel will flop and I won’t need to feel guilty then. constructed of interviews, witness accounts, text exchanges, tumblr posts, podcast transcripts and journalistic musings, this is a book about so many things at once. it explores the true crime industrial complex, the ethics of consuming true crime as entertainment, early tumblr fandoms that were nurtured and followed like religion, internet radicalisation, bullying, small town lore and politics, and the living hell that is teenage girlhood. As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in these spaces, I found Clark’s rendition embarrassingly accurate. I don’t think any other author has ever managed to capture the exact tone and voice of a Tumblr community the way she did in this book. There were excerpts from fictional posts and conversations that made me laugh out loud for how closely they resembled the kind of delirious content you see every day on these platforms. I found myself both cringing away from and delighting in these sections of the story, but most of all, I was amazed at the author’s ability to faithfully re-create such very specific interactions in a different medium. TW: Do you think true crime is, to some extent, more palatable when establishment media reports on it, rather than Netflix or podcasters? So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously.