Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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i loved boy parts and i love eliza clark, so it's not a surprise that this book was perfect for me. I am so excited to even hear about Penance, but once I heard the premise and structure, I was fizzing with anticipation. Angelica, Dolly and Violet gag Joni as they drive towards a beach hut in the fictional Yorkshire town of Crow-on-Sea. There they torture her, cut off her hair, douse her in petrol and set her alight. They flee the scene to buy milkshakes at McDonald’s, while Joni regains consciousness and runs to a nearby B&B. Burned raw, she is put in an ambulance, where she soon dies of her injuries.

Carelli lays out the facts of the murder plainly from the start: “At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, 16-year-old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet.” The assailants were three of her high school classmates — Angelica Stirling-Stewart, Violet Hubbard and Dorothy “Dolly” Hart. As Carelli proceeds through the events leading up to that night, the gyre of his investigation widens, and Joan takes up less and less space in the story of her own death. So much for Penance’s narrator; but what of its reader, engrossed by his uncannily realistic account of human misery? Penance answers Boy Parts’s question – art or porn? – by suggesting that the distinction isn’t always so clear. Slyly, it wonders if readers of Granta-endorsed literary fiction are so different from mere voyeurs. And would they ever pay attention to a town such as Crow-on-Sea unless drawn by morbid curiosity? My first and biggest complaint is that this book is much too long. Too much time was given to the towns history. I don't care about what Viking discovered it or how it got it's name.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. If it bleeds, it leads. We know this only too well. Ours is a society that consumes as much violence as it does sugar. We are so inured to the effects of both that each hit must be greater than the last. In her first novel, Boy Parts, Eliza Clark gave us the female version of American Psycho. Her latest, Penance, is the story of a girl who is burnt alive and proceeds to stagger around a seaside town without any skin. Clark understands the rules of the game. The bloodthirsty are never quenched. There are problems. If you’re the kind of reader to wallow in a true-crime story, you’ll know there’s no shortage of real ones out there, and it’s hard to forget that this one is bogus. As the book’s faux-journalistic investigation uncovers every inch of Joan’s death, the accumulated detail can feel hollow. But while Clark also makes you collude in the dead-girl industrial complex – all those podcasts, all those Netflix series – with a novel that (you might argue) sits firmly within that complex itself, her skill means that she just about gets away with the crime. Penance is written with such intelligence and dark humour that it’s disturbingly hard to object. The window into true crime podcasts and tumblr felt really authentic and broke up the prose nicely, really enjoyed those sections.

In the end, I had expected this to be more obviously a representation of a manipulative fictional author and while there are gestures in the main body of the text, this aspect only really tops and tails the narrative. Instead, this is exhaustive on the lives of female adolescents treated in turn with all the daily fractures of friendship, and the influences that create their world from household secrets and pressures to online obsessions with killers.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. At its simplest, Eliza Clark’s second novel is a horror story. It centres around the tale of three teenage girls who murder their schoolmate, 16-year-old Joni Wilson. 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. 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.