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Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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Penance is, first and foremost, a novel about crafting your own narrative. It features a gallery of varyingly unreliable, manipulative characters who—consciously or not—are all supremely concerned with creating a self-serving story to absolve themselves from any responsibility in the book’s central event, the gruesome murder of a teenage girl.

Cheers to Eliza Clark, a second novel is usually more difficult to connect with from author to audience but I feel this one was on par with her first - Boy Parts. 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. at this point i've read several things that deal with or depict parts of internet culture that i was in and most of the time i find it really cringe. things like chat logs, tags, memes, are hard to take seriously out of context and you DID have to be there or it doesn't really work lmao. clark has made it work extraordinarily well? because she was obviously In It, because it's hard to fabricate the PRECISE phrasing and punctuation of internet language as well as she does, and because she's just a mature writer. it takes a level of maturity to depict the immaturity of young people without making it feel overly nostalgic or voyeuristic. insanely specific and recognizable and terrible. cannot stress enough. at several points. nauseating 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. 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.

Featured Reviews

EC: For me, the most considered and interesting sort of true crime reporting has been in longform books that spend a lot of time with the victim and the broader sociopolitical context of the murder, which is something that a book gives you space to do, rather than just an hour of documentary, where you’ve got to get people to go on to the next episode, or an hour-long podcast where you really need to get your mattress advert in. A brutal murder sits at the centre of Eliza Clark’s Penance. A group of teenage girls set another girl on fire. But the story doesn’t cause an outrage. It doesn’t hit the headlines. The Brexit vote is seen as a more pressing news item. Now, journalist Alex Z. Carelli has taken it upon himself to be the definitive chronicler of the arson murder in Crow-on-Sea. Clark’s novel is a metafiction, a pastiche of a true-crime book that includes witness interviews, extensive histories, podcast transcripts and more. 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 ?

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. Once again, Eliza Clark conjures her dark magic to pen something disturbing and addictive.' @mostardentlyalice Taking aim at our relationship with true crime, the brutality of teenage girls and classicism, it was easily my favourite read of 2023 so far.' @charlotte__reads_ 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.’” 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.Eliza Clark: I suppose I was just generally interested in it. Originally, I wanted to write Penance as this fake true crime thing, because there was this case I was particularly interested in. Then as I started reading more high-quality true crime, as well as listening to more slightly dubious podcasts that were engaged with a lot of the muddier areas around true crime, my relationship with the genre shifted a lot. I wanted to do something more critical. Any lingering suspicions that Clark is a mere provocateur will be banished by Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. There’s none of the lazy writing that occasionally blemished Boy Parts (where one character is “pretty as a picture and thin as a rake” and, a few lines later, “flat as a board”). Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations. How many writers, for instance, would set their much-heralded new work in the unglamorous leave-voting northern town of “Crow-on-Sea”? It’s here that, a bogus foreword informs us, the action of the book we’re about to read – Penance by true-crime journalist Alec Carelli – takes place. 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.

The narrative itself comprises a range of modes of writing: from podcast scripts to 1st person narrative from the author of the true crime book, to Q&A transcriptions of interviews and online message boards. I wasn't even able to finish Eliza Clark's debut, Boy Parts, so color me surprised when my interest was piqued when her sophomore novel hit NetGalley. Here's an example of when I'm glad to have given an author another chance. This book isn't perfect by any means, I'll discuss that in a bit, but it's leaps and bounds better than her debut, in my opinion. I absolutely love a book which has multiple perspectives, multiple data sources and timelines so I knew I would love this. I’m also a true crime cynic so I felt this was an intriguing concept from my perspective.So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously. The three years Penance took to write were, she says, akin to pulling teeth, unlike the pleasure she got from Boy Parts, a mischievous satire narrated by a predatory photographer whose images of her male victims are hailed at a hip London gallery as edgy roleplay. “People who’ve read it maybe think I’ll be more of a wind-up merchant when they meet me, but I’ve got more of a primary school teacher energy than an enfant terrible vibe,” Clark says. There’s a lot more work coming out in the past year or so about true crime as a phenomenon, whether that’s novels or nonfiction. How did you want or see Penance fitting into that discussion, or did it fit into this discussion more organically? Remember the teenage girl who was murdered in Crow-on-Sea in 2016? A horrific story. Google it. Or the journalist Alec Z. Carelli, the guy who went to school with Louis Theroux, Adam Buxton and Giles Coren and wrote a book about it? Remember how it was pulled because of the controversy over the way he obtained some of his material? Well, the publisher has decided to release that book after all. and it does so brilliantly, through an unreliable crooked journalist narrator, through the lens of true-crime fandom, through clever workings of sympathy and fact.

Turning some of the darkest elements of teenage internet culture, serial killer fandoms, into a literary fiction novel is definitely a choice and it pays off, offering something that is disturbing but also feels like something you could definitely find online without much effort. It forces people to question some of the lines between these kinds of content—true crime books and podcasts, serial killer fanfiction, etc—to see that it isn't always an easy 'this one is okay and this one is terrible', but that everything is going to be tinged with personal opinion, motivation, and perspectives.

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None of it worked for me. I kept putting the book down and it got to the point where I had to write a post-it with everyone's names and who they were because I kept forgetting (or didn't care enough to try to remember). Penance is made up of different kinds of media. It’s set in the fictional town of Crow-on-Sea around the time of the Brexit referendum, with nonfiction elements woven in. Did that form and style come first or did writing about true crime sort of lend itself to that form? Or did it just sort of all come together naturally? So this book is actually a fictional story parading around like a true crime novel and I kind of love it for that.

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