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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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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.

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. 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. The window into true crime podcasts and tumblr felt really authentic and broke up the prose nicely, really enjoyed those sections. do you know what happened to her already? did you catch it in the papers? are you local? did you know her? BP: Oh my god, I was laughing so much at that because, I don’t know, the idea of donkey strangling is just so funny.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.

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. Now the Clark pipeline is running hot: as well as several screen projects she can’t discuss, she’s writing another novel (“a kind of speculative fiction thing”); in the autumn, there’s a stage adaptation of Boy Parts (which has also been optioned); and next year there will be a story collection “bouncing around” sci-fi and horror (one of the stories, She’s Always Hungry, is in the current issue of Granta; if you’ve read it and were left puzzled, Clark says 2,000 words were lopped off the end “in a way that may not be clear”, her admirably level phrase). 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. Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.”Penance follows a faux true-crime story of a teenager murdered; tortured and set on fire by three of her classmates in a small sea-side town. 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. 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? 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?

What I personally found most disturbing was the characters’ sense of moral righteousness, their insistence that their own actions were invariably morally superior to those of the other people involved in the case. If you’ve spent any time on the internet or in the real world, you know that this is exactly how most people react to discovering that their mindless behavior has led to devastating consequences for someone else: they rush to create a self-absolving narrative that allows them to avoid accountability for what they did. 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.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? 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. 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 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 Will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror' Guardian (on Boy Parts)