Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously. EC: My two main inspirations were the Shanda Sharer murder which happened in the 90s in the States, which is probably the most direct comparison [In 1992, 12-year-old Shanda Sharer was tortured and burned to death by a group of older teenage girls]. And there are some aspects that are drawn from the Suzanne Capper murder, which also happened in the 1990s, but her murder coincided with the Jamie Bulger murder trial, so nobody has heard of that case even though it’s very extreme and very awful. That’s where the idea of a crime getting buried by a story that is dominating the news cycle came from. 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.

i loved boy parts and i love eliza clark, so it's not a surprise that this book was perfect for me. 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. Penance is a book very much set in the early 2010s and Clark knows what she is talking about - for a book that is so steeped in Tumblr culture it could have gone wrong, but I'm glad to say it hit the tone exactly. The pastiche structure reminds me of recent banger True Story by Kate Reed Petty, or Carrie by Stephen King but, Eliza being Eliza, Penance is truly one of a kind. A compulsive rollercoaster of murder, 2010s internet culture, urban decay in the northeast, and the cruelty of adolescence. I was completely swallowed by it, and felt a morbid sorrow to see it end. Eliza is just so astute, and the examination of true crime is second to none.

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. 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?

Andrew Hankinson An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed A teasing piece of crime fiction weaves together real and invented murders in a satire on the true crime genre and its devotees Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power.’ 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 The setting of Penance (a Northern seaside town in decline), the crux of the plot (what is the truth about a notorious murder that took place seven years ago?), and the format (a mixed-media approach incorporating lots of interviews) all make it feel like a long-lost cousin of the Six Stories series, though here the medium is a true-crime book written by a shifty journalist – think Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story – rather than a podcast. The crime at its centre is the gruesome death of a teenager after she was set on fire by three classmates. Like an ever-growing number of modern novels about murder, it’s concerned with the mechanics of true crime and how ‘true’ it ever really is, though I don’t think Clark’s concern lies as much with the ‘ethics of true crime’ as it does with the messiness of ‘the truth’ and how we come to decide what we believe. What is truth, really, when there is no single tidy, complete version of a story? Once again, Eliza Clark conjures her dark magic to pen something disturbing and addictive.' @mostardentlyalice

Featured Reviews

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. The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done.

clark's research game is strooong in this one; she has constructed a world full of fleshy characters and compulsive plotlines that completely swallowed me whole. What is this book trying to do? At least one thing too many, that's for sure. I debated giving it 2 stars but gave it 3 in large part because it at least is a book that understands teenagers and social media (in this case we get a whole lot of Tumblr) which you really don't see enough. 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.Please keep in mind, that this book is entirely fictional, however, I found myself researching things that are completely made up because the narrative just felt so real. speaking of maturity this book gets into so many things at once that I'm really not sure how she keeps any of it straight. it's about the ethics of true crime, the overall meanness and greed with which it's consumed, how much of it is not really about the truth at all. it's about small towns in decline. it feels trite to say it's About Girlhood but it is, every time she zooms in closer on the lives of these kids and the specific ways and times that they were all violent and all vulnerable, no excuse given or needed, it's just like that. layered over all of that we're thinking about our narrator the whole time and how he's even able to recount events in this much detail. how indeed. 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.

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. 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. Absolutely here for books and media that put a spotlight on the true crime fascination and just how weird it is/can become. Add in a mixed media format, different narratives, and past/present timelines - *chefs kiss*. 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.

Advance Praise

You mentioned people taking part in serial killer fandoms in an ironic way, but it’s often difficult to work out what is ironic online: when is someone doing a bit or making fun of something and what is serious engagement with a belief, subculture or discourse. BP: The central crime in the book is very brutal. And I like that you made it about these young girls who just took things way too far. What led you to this specific crime and this specific group of girls? 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 exhau