Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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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. Some parts were uncomfortable to read, but that’s to be expected given the subject matter and I don’t think it was ever gratuitous. I also loved the ‘b’ plot of the Cherry Creek shooting and could have read more of that. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our 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.

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? Alongside the crime focus is a detailed depiction of a small run-down coastal town situated between Scarborough and Whitby. The beats here are woven in seamlessly: from the Dracula connection of Whitby to the witch trials, to the local UKIP MP and a Jimmy Saville-alike abuser-in-plain-sight local 'hero'.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.

plus, i was Very Much on the ~dark side~ of tumblr* throughout the 2010s (*defo NOT serial killer tumblr) and i'm so interested in reading about this microcosm of old gen z/young millennial adolescence, so that being so central to the narrative was so exciting to me! 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. The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done. 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. 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.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.” 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. TW: Do you think true crime is, to some extent, more palatable when establishment media reports on it, rather than Netflix or podcasters?

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. i loved boy parts and i love eliza clark, so it's not a surprise that this book was perfect for me. Maybe more so because I’d only just read Clark’s incredible Boy Parts last week, so my expectations going in were slighter higher than I thought they would be ?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.

Disturbing and extremely captivating novel about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl by three teenage girls in a small seaside town in the north of England. The story is being told by a true crime journalist through historical research, interviews, podcasts, internet stuff, and correspondence with the killers themselves. Clark manages very well to draw you into this gruesome tale, but also shows excellently how complicated life can be for teenagers; with all the insecurities, wanting to belong, peer pressure, bullying, social media etc. On top of that, the ending is certainly surprising 😊

Advance Praise

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 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. 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? 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. Eliza Clark: I suppose I was just generally interested in it. Originally, I wanted to write Penance as this fake true crime thing, because there was this case I was particularly interested in. Then as I started reading more high-quality true crime, as well as listening to more slightly dubious podcasts that were engaged with a lot of the muddier areas around true crime, my relationship with the genre shifted a lot. I wanted to do something more critical.