Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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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. 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. So this book is actually a fictional story parading around like a true crime novel and I kind of love it for that. After Boy Parts, it is easy to anticipate something exciting from Eliza Clark, and Penance goes in a very different direction, but definitely lived up to my expectations. It is entirely written in true crime framing, with the journalist's book and a follow up interview, and this is very effective in getting across the complexity of true crime and what counts as entertainment, research, and factual content. Carelli's book is a mixture of his descriptions of interviews and research, snippets from podcasts and social media posts, and dramatised sections that describe events as if in a novel or similar, and these all weave together to create this vision of what a writer might want to say about something so sensational. The narrative is so gripping, and Clark's writing adapts to the registers that suit each part, that you feel fully engrossed in the story even as you question why it is being told like this. 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.

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. 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 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. TW: The seaside town also allows you to draw out these polarised class dynamics, especially in the lead-up to the Brexit vote. Why did you choose that period for the murder to take place? TW: Could you tell us a bit about constructing this fictional seaside town in decline, set between real locations on the east coast?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. The three years Penance took to write were, she says, akin to pulling teeth, unlike the pleasure she got from Boy Parts, a mischievous satire narrated by a predatory photographer whose images of her male victims are hailed at a hip London gallery as edgy roleplay. “People who’ve read it maybe think I’ll be more of a wind-up merchant when they meet me, but I’ve got more of a primary school teacher energy than an enfant terrible vibe,” Clark says. 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. It’s an oft-repeated adage that ‘crime doesn’t pay’, but true crime certainly does. True crime is a booming industry as new Netflix dramas, documentaries, and podcasts constantly drop, with the top earners – such as the podcasts My Favourite Murder and True Crime Obsessed – making millions each year. But more and more people are questioning our appetite for these grisly tales, whether it’s OK to have a favourite serial killer, and the ethics of profiting from other people’s suffering and death. This is a book which is about being a teenage girl and it made me remember how brutal it is to be a teenage girl. The friendships, the fallouts, the drama. It’s also of course a story about murder.

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. 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. Do you know what happened already? DHallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power.’ 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. 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. 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. 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.