Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

Product Information

Eliza Clark: Definitely Rachel Munroe’s Savage Appetites and Francisco Garcia’s We All Go Into the Dark . There is a really fabulous book about the Raoul Moat incident called You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) by Andrew Hankinson. And if people are looking for something else fictional there’s a really fantastic web comic by Max Graves, a really interesting trans comic artist – the first part of it is called Dog Names. It’s a character study of a teen boy who was caught up in a murder and he’s also chronically online and won’t get off Tumblr. I read it shortly after I finished Penance and was just blown away by how fresh and how interesting it is. I think someone should give him loads and loads of money for it. Eliza Clark is one of those authors I feel privileged to have found early in her career and be able to follow her evolution.

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. There will be no upset loved ones –except perhaps those who were affected by the true crimes mentioned 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. Penance looks at the more extreme true crime fandom space, where people might write fanfiction about serial killers or school shooters. What made you want to look at that rather than just the more mainstream podcasts or YouTube side?BP: I want to hear about how you created the town of Crow-on-Sea because, genuinely, I feel I could draw an accurate map of the place. There is a level of detail in your description of this town through its history, its buildings and its inhabitants that is just not seen in contemporary fiction anymore. 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. The way people will try and pursue truth and the lengths people will go to to do so is often quite ruthless and jarring. That was something I found fascinating in Penance, this idea of how far can you really have a ‘truth’ about a crime like this, especially when there are multiple people involved.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. BP: One thing I really loved about Penance was how much of early 2010s Tumblr you put in there. All the creepypasta stuff and references to Slenderman. I feel that was such a huge part of the adolescence of our generation.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? Some parts were uncomfortable to read, but that’s to be expected given the subject matter and I don’t think it was ever gratuitous. I also loved the ‘b’ plot of the Cherry Creek shooting and could have read more of that. 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.