Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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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. It's quite different from Clark's first novel, Boy Parts, which I also loved, but I think I like his one more. It’s in these sections, where internet sites are shown to be dangerous spaces where violent tendencies go unchecked, that Clark is most scathing. Having loved Boy Parts since I received a proof in early 2020, I had sky high hopes for Clark’s second novel.

Eliza Clark’s New Novel Explores the Twisted Ethics of True Crime The author’s second book, Penance, is filled with tales of witchcraft and murderous Tumblr cults. I was really interested in the weirdness but also the arrogance of that, and the psychology of the kind of person who decides that they are the arbiter of the narrative. Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities. Carelli instead bestows most of the narrative weight on the perspectives of her murderers, and on his own suppositions about their motives. In 2023, Boy Parts helped land Clark on Granta ’s once-a-decade list of the best young British novelists.

There was also that TV show Channel Zero that adapted, like, one creepypasta per season and they did Candle Cove which, in my opinion, is the best-written creepypasta. It also depicts going to a bog standard British school very well, especially in terms of how different kinds of outsiders function and how difficult it can be for the "misfits" to actually get along when all they have in common is being different (Jayde's story in particular felt packed full of elements straight out of an actual school from that time, like assumptions about your family, being seen as one of the only gay teenagers, and being into sports but not in a cool way). There’s a lot more work coming out in the past year or so about true crime as a phenomenon, whether that’s novels or nonfiction. It’s always been something that I’ve been interested in, but it was something that I was getting increasingly critical of, and my relationship with [it] changed quite a lot while I was writing Penance as well.

Crow is tainted by its connection to a predatory sex offender named Vance Diamond, a Jimmy Savile stand-in with a meticulously described BBC game show of his own. I read it shortly after I finished Penance and was just blown away by how fresh and how interesting it is. is a more intriguing question than ‘why are potentially three different men in our community doing this to women they’ve met on nights out? 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 ? I absolutely love a book which has multiple perspectives, multiple data sources and timelines so I knew I would love this.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. But you don’t want to be the arsehole who’s like: ‘ Actually, if you were to check TikTok and ask 20-year-old girls on humanities courses at university, you’d find that one of these books is actually very popular,’” she says, with a winningly wicked laugh. 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.