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. 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. Though I think the main issue here is this, the book simply doesn’t know what it’s actually about -which means us (the reader/s) in turn, also don’t know what it’s about. 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. do you know what happened to her already? did you catch it in the papers? are you local? did you know her?

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? 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). So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously. 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.

Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself. 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.

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. 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? 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. 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. 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_

Advance Praise

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.

Once again, Eliza Clark conjures her dark magic to pen something disturbing and addictive.' @mostardentlyalice Eliza Clark’s Penance is a fictional recreation of one of true crime’s most enduring staples the dead-white-girl story. Presented as a new edition of investigative non-fiction by Alec Carelli, Penance centres on the torture and murder of Yorkshire teenager Joan or Joni Wilson by a group of her fellow schoolgirls in 2016 – we’re told Carelli’s original edition was pulled from the shelves in a manner reminiscent of the fate of real-world, crime writer Paul Harrison’s Mind Games. Carelli is an interesting creation, a washed-up, former journalist who’s not ashamed to admit Penance was a bid to cash in on the phenomenal rise of true crime fuelled by online podcasts like Serial. In Carelli Clark has deliberately constructed a narrator who’s deeply suspect, someone almost impossibly distanced from the crime and the environment he’s supposedly interrogating. He’s ruthless enough to exploit his daughter’s death by suicide to get an interview but he’s also an unthinking, posh bloke who clearly knows nothing about the issues of class, gender, and power that this crime evokes. Clark however, a former true crime enthusiast, clearly does know her stuff, convincingly representing the complexities of the genre and its mostly female followers: from fangirling to fanfic. Here and there dropping breadcrumbs that gradually accumulate to undermine Carelli’s version of so-called “facts.”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.” 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. Alongside the crime focus is a detail 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. At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, sixteen year old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet. Her assailants were three other teenage girls - all four girls attended the same high school."

TW: Do you think a social media platform like Tumblr actually helps radicalise young people, and drive them to commit real acts of violence, as it does in Penance ? 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. 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.

Featured Reviews

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 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? 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.