Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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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. 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.” 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. 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?

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.”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. 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. 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.

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. Alongside the crime focus is a detail 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. Barry Pierce: I feel Penance is coming out at a perfect time because it feels we are somewhat endlessly in a cycle where people are questioning the ethics of true crime, be it through books or through Netflix series. Was that on your mind when you were writing the book?Eliza Clark: It all came together gradually. It took me quite a long time to write Penance compared to Boy Parts . But also, I did want to do something more formally ambitious. I wanted to prove that I could do something very different to Boy Parts , to myself and to readers.

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. 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. 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. 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 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 In this sense, the book is a radical departure from Clark’s 2020 debut, Boy Parts , a hallucinatory story told from the perspective of a young photographer, Irina, whose sense of her own invisibility escalates toward violence. (In 2023, Boy Parts helped land Clark on Granta ’s once-a-decade list of the best young British novelists.) Penance ’s dark humour occupies a similar space, however, as do its keen observations on the edgier niches of internet culture in the mid-2010s, explored in passages that ricochet between the crime itself, the witch-hunting history of Crow, and the precarious landscapes of pre-censorship Tumblr and true crime message boards. On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls. 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. 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.

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 ? All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world. Although Clark’s second novel Penance takes quite a different approach to her first one (don’t go into this expecting Boy Parts 2.0), her debut gives enough of a hint that she knows how to make a novel like this work.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?