Do you know what happened already?Did you know her?Did you see it on the internet?Did you listen to a podcast?Did the hosts make jokes? penance' is a journalist's account of the gruesome murder of sixteen-year-old joni, which occured on the eve of the brexit vote, in a northern english seaside town, at the hands of three teenage girls. 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. 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.

TW: Could you tell us a bit about constructing this fictional seaside town in decline, set between real locations on the east coast? 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 this, Penance also provides an unflinching and disturbing look at what has become the true-crime industrial complex, specifically in relation to internet fandom culture. Clark captures the pure malice and nastiness of 2010s internet culture in such a way that you simultaneously recoil in horror and laugh at how accurate it is. She is one of the few authors I’ve read who write about the internet in an authentic way, you can really tell she was in the trenches of tumblr like the rest of us. 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. 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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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.

plus, i was Very Much on the ~dark side~ of tumblr* throughout the 2010s (*defo NOT serial killer tumblr) and i'm so interested in reading about this microcosm of old gen z/young millennial adolescence, so that being so central to the narrative was so exciting to me! 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. 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. 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. 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.Once again, Eliza Clark conjures her dark magic to pen something disturbing and addictive.' @mostardentlyalice

Even though the sole focus of this book is the crime itself, I could not help but be in awe at the amazing portrayal of the impact of the internet on young minds and how certain interests, while unique, can lead to terrible consequences. EC: I’m really excited about it! I haven’t read the script yet, I think they’re still in the process of putting it together, but I know it’s going to be a one-woman show and they’re going to draw mostly from the book. I’m really interested to see how they stage it and see what bits they use. 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.’” 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.

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The characterisation is brilliant, specifically in terms of how Clark writes the teenage characters navigating the discomfort of adolescence and trying to forge a sense of self in a small, suffocating seaside town (relatable). She also perfectly, and horrifyingly, captures the cruelty of teenage female friendship groups and how awful teenagers can be to one another.

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. Eliza Clark: It all came together gradually. It took me quite a long time to write Penance compared to Boy Parts . But also, I did want to do something more formally ambitious. I wanted to prove that I could do something very different to Boy Parts , to myself and to readers. The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done. 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. THIS BOOK! I heard so many amazing things about Eliza Clark so I was ecstatic when I started reading this one. Penance is a novel written from the perspective of Alec Z. Carelli, a former journalist and failed author, writing a book about one of the most tragic and nauseating crimes committed in a small British town. But is his point of view accurate?

Advance Praise

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. 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. 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.