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. 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.

Absolutely here for books and media that put a spotlight on the true crime fascination and just how weird it is/can become. Add in a mixed media format, different narratives, and past/present timelines - *chefs kiss*. 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. 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? BP: There’s also all the weird serial killer stuff that was on Tumblr though, like I remember the Jeffrey Dahmer flower crowns and the weird fandom around the Columbine dudes. Remember when everyone thought the Boston Bomber was really hot? Like what an insane time. Penance is made up of different kinds of media. It’s set in the fictional town of Crow-on-Sea around the time of the Brexit referendum, with nonfiction elements woven in. Did that form and style come first or did writing about true crime sort of lend itself to that form? Or did it just sort of all come together naturally?You mentioned people taking part in serial killer fandoms in an ironic way, but it’s often difficult to work out what is ironic online: when is someone doing a bit or making fun of something and what is serious engagement with a belief, subculture or discourse. as someone who abhors true crime, i found reading this exploration of how evil it can be and who has the right to tell a story and what even constitutes "true" extremely satisfying. TW: Could you tell us a bit about constructing this fictional seaside town in decline, set between real locations on the east coast? Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention…

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.

Penance,” Eliza Clark’s sophomore novel, begins with a fictional but realistic disclaimer: The following book is a work of nonfiction written by the English journalist Alec Z. Carelli and examining the grisly 2016 murder of a North Yorkshire teenager. “Shortly after publication, several of Carelli’s interviewees publicly accused Carelli of misrepresenting and even fabricating some of the content of their interviews,” the text reads; the author also illegally acquired therapeutic writing by two of the incarcerated perpetrators. We enter this book already aware that our narrator is an untrustworthy one. But as we whip out our imaginary magnifying glasses, distracted by our eagerness to play sleuth and look for the lies in Carelli’s story, Clark shrewdly turns her own lens onto us, onto our obsession with true crime and our complicity in the industry it has spawned.

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. 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. Her debut, Boy Parts, was not even my favourite book of 2020, but one of my all-time favourite books. The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done. 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?

Do you know what happened already? D 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 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. So this book is actually a fictional story parading around like a true crime novel and I kind of love it for that. So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously.

Carelli instead bestows most of the narrative weight on the perspectives of her murderers, and on his own suppositions about their motives. Revenge, bullying, betrayal, the dull and bottomless rage of being teenage girls whose lives have been shaped by the abuses of powerful men, a fascination with the occult that goes too far: All of it plays a role in what will happen inside that beach chalet, though our unreliable narrator prevents us from knowing to what extent. 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? 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 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." 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_ 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.