Tag: books

Penance by Eliza Clark

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Penance is a novel masquerading as a true crime book written by a disgraced journalist, exploring the murder of a sixteen year old by three other teenage girls in a run down seaside resort in North Yorkshire. Nearly a decade ago, Crow-on-Sea was rocked by the murder of Joan Wilson in a beach chalet by three girls. Now, journalist Alec Z. Carelli is publishing his book about this murder, the apparent definitive account based on staying in the town, interviewing those connected to the victim and perpetrators, and getting an insight into their lives and social media accounts. The thing is, is he really telling the true story?

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.

A really compelling element of Penance is the exploration of teenage girlhood and particularly elements of it that aren’t usually turned into novels: strange macabre online obsessions, petty fallings out and friendship changes turning into something much more charged, what it is like to be caught in various stereotypes, particularly in a small town. It is truly a book for people who were too online in the 2000s or 2010s, and though footnotes in the book explain concepts from Tumblr and Livejournal (as if it was a middle-aged journalist explaining them), there’s definitely a sense of ‘if you know, you know’, which is also how the characters seem to feel at times. And it is packed full of little details that make it all come together (for example, one of the girls has a harmless blog where she’s obsessed with musicals and Glee, rather than an edgy blog about death or killers). Filtering this all through the journalist Carelli gives it an extra layer, this middle-aged man trying to understand teenage girls (and with his own motivations too). 

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. 

Also woven in are some very British elements, like in Boy Parts: the backdrop of Brexit and one of the characters having a UKIP father, the class divides in a small town, the legends and histories of a fading seaside town, abuse scandals from former entertainers. 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). Similarly to in Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, there’s a sense that Britain itself formed a place for everything in Penance to happen, that it was a malevolent force in some way (or at least helped form the pocket hells that the perpetrators are looking for).

Immediately gripping and also forcing you to question why that is, Penance is both a highly entertaining read and a book that poses a lot of questions, not all answered. The nature of it only being Alec Z. Carelli’s book and a follow up interview means you don’t really know what actually “happened”, as with true crime stories, or if that even really matters. For people who haven’t misspent a lot of time on the internet, it might not feel quite so real and immediate, but for me, it was like taking a 2 hour video essay on some old internet drama and turning it into a layered novel about the darkness of teenage girls, the impacts of true crime, and how anything is ever even constructed as “true” in the first place. Plus it might be the first novel I’ve ever read that mentions Neopets, so that is a win from me.

Kala by Colin Walsh

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Kala is a novel about teenage friendship and youth, revenge and forgiveness, as three adults find themselves back in their Irish hometown. Mush, Helen, and Joe haven’t really spoken in years, but they are all back in Kinlough, where they were friends as teenagers along with Kala, Aiden, and Aoife, but Kala’s disappearance in 2003 started the path of them falling out of touch. When human remains are found in the woods and two more teenage girls go missing, the three must face up to what they remember about the past and the secrets Kinlough is hiding.

The book is told from three perspectives, moving fluidly between the past and present as the narrative unfolds. It doesn’t take long to pick up the protagonists’ perspectives—Mush who never left, Joe who is famous and struggling with alcohol and fans, and Helen, who left and doesn’t know how to come back—and the many characters in the novel are vividly drawn (with the exception maybe of Aoife, who seems purposefully further outside of narrative, which I expected to go somewhere, but didn’t). By the end, you see a lot more of the complexities of the characters, and I almost wished to have seen just a bit more of their character development beyond the end, which perhaps shows how it draws you into their personalities and lives.

The combination of literary and thriller elements gives the book its pace and readability, and I think without one or the other it wouldn’t work, but instead it brings together a look at the innocence or ignorance of youth and the troubles of growing up from teenage friends with a suspenseful story of small town corruption and teenagers stumbling upon this. Kala is a good book to get immersed in and read in one sitting, with the tense plot making it more interesting than a book just about growing up in a small Irish town.

You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

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You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight is a horror novel about teenagers working at an immersive horror summer camp experience who suddenly get more scares than they bargained for. Charity is playing the final girl at Camp Mirror Lake, filming location of a famous slasher film and now a full contact horror experience during the summer. As the season draws to a close, other employees start disappearing and Charity thinks she’s seeing figures around camp, but surely it’s just the spooky atmosphere, or so she thinks until it turns out Camp Mirror Lake has more of a history than she realised, and it’s up to her, her girlfriend Bezi, and anyone else left to try and stay alive.

Though this was badged as young adult horror, it’s definitely a crossover book, as despite having a teenage protagonist it doesn’t really feel like young adult fiction, more just like general horror. The plot starts off seeming like it is going a standard slasher route, but it actually goes off in a different direction partway through, whilst still playing around with having characters who are meant to understand horror tropes because they reenact them all the time. The narrative is pretty fun and, most notably for me, I did find the early parts of the book quite scary, with a real sense of them being out in the woods alone with something unknown going on. 

It’s a pretty fast-paced book and is fairly short too, meaning that it is mostly tension and doesn’t get boring. There’s some elements that could’ve had more explanation, but it comes together pretty well, and the ending is fitting, making it a good horror read especially for fans of slashers that don’t do a straight slasher or fiction that plays with the summer camp goes bad vibe.

Girls of Little Hope by Dale Halvorsen and Sam Beckbessinger

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Girls of Little Hope is a horror novel about three teenage friends in small town America who find more than they bargained when they explored a hidden nearby cave. It is the 90s and Donna, Rae, and Kat are fed up of their hometown of Little Hope, California. When they explore a mysterious cave as part of a bid to have something cool to write about in the zine they’re selling at school, however, only two of them come back: Donna can’t remember anything and Rae wants to hide whatever it was that happened. What happened to them might make all the difference for Little Hope.

The book is told by following Donna, Rae, and Kat’s mother Marybeth, as well as excerpts from Kat’s diary and some “found” documents, but the layers of perspective don’t make it confusing. The early part of the book is slower and you can’t really tell where on earth it is going to go, but once it hits around the halfway mark, the real horror elements become much more apparent. There’s a focus on the characters in the book: particularly the three main teenage girls, but also their relationships with their families and the ways in which they need each other and their differences. 

There are some real issues delved into (it is worth being aware before reading that the book feature/talk about self harm quite a bit), particularly with Rae who has a strict Christian family and cannot rebel or know herself in the same ways that Donna and Kat do. Because it’s a horror book, a lot of these elements don’t really get to go anywhere by the end (with the except of Kat’s story) because character has to turn to the plot, which is particularly a shame in the case of Rae who by the end really needs a bit more space for all of the stuff that has happened to her to be addressed.

Throughout the book, teenage friendships are shown as vital, and this all comes together with the conclusion, which is a neat way of making a horror story about friendships end by reiterating this. As the pun in the title suggests, the three main characters are the weird girls, who’ve come together and bonded through this, and a horror story is a fun way to explore this, seeing as lot of weird teenagers really get into horror books and films as well. Girls of Little Hope is a fun horror book set in the 90s that’s perfect if you used to read 90s Point Horror books as a teenager and want something that feels a bit like that but with a much more complex and interesting plot.

Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai

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Mild Vertigo is a stream-of-consciousness novel about a housewife in modern day Tokyo, exploring what makes up her life and how societal structures and capitalism impact it. Natsumi lives in an apartment with her husband and two young sons, and her days are made up of regular mundanity, like laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, observing and talking to the neighbours, and thinking about her family. Each chapter is a separate episode, generally focusing on a theme but moving around topics as Natsumi’s mind does, packed into a neat package like many of the things in Natsumi’s life.

The stream of consciousness element stands out a lot in this book, and the translation made this easily readable, unlike some stream of consciousness narratives, as sentences flow into each other and there is a real sense of things passing by Natsumi (especially in the grocery shopping parts). The other thing is the separate chapters: I found out after reading that these were all written separately, but also to be brought together into a novel. I wouldn’t have guessed this from reading, as I felt like the episodic nature made sense, apart from the two photography reviews which I also learnt apparently are real life reviews by the author. I found this part of the book hard to engage with as I don’t know much about photography or the people referenced, and was glad when it returned to Natsumi’s life rather than her reading these reviews (though it’s definitely an interesting concept to put in a book).

The book does well to depict the ‘mild vertigo’ of late stage capitalism and the ways in which Natsumi feels both a part of and external to things in her life. Not much happens, of course, as that is really the point, and as a short book it is easy to get engrossed in the reality and unreality of Natsumi’s life.

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

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The Late Americans is a novel that weaves together the lives of a range of young people in Iowa, exploring relationships, sex, class, race, and searching for your future. A group of dancers are looking to see what they do when their college course ends, various friends test their dynamics with sex and arguments, and, eventually, some of them go to a cabin for a last vacation before they leave Iowa.

Each section of the book tells a chunk of the story through a focus on a particular character or two, mostly within a particular friend group though some characters are much more on the periphery than others, and you continue to see characters and their narratives even once their particular chapter is over. I was expecting this structure to be more confusing than it actually was: it isn’t a style of novel I tend to enjoy, but in this case I felt I could easily start to pick up how everyone wove together after the first few chapters and the perspective changes meant you go to see various viewpoints and senses of character dynamics. The writing has a distinctive style, occasionally purposefully at arms’ length, and it may take a moment to get used to, but then it does bring an interesting vibe to the novel, a sense of zooming in and out, seeing into the lives of complex characters who often make mistakes and put pressure on their relationships.

Even if you’re not usually a fan of novels that move between a range of characters in a broader group, The Late Americans may be worth reading (also, I found Taylor’s Real Life just fine and preferred this one). It depicts a messy group of people who have different takes on the world, but are all looking for their future, and does create something coherent out of the cacophony.

Y/N by Esther Yi

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Y/N is a surreal novel about a woman who quickly descends into obsession with a K-pop idol and believes she is the only person who understands him. The narrator is a Korean-American woman who lives in Berlin and had no interest in K-pop or fandoms until she happens to go to a concert with her roommate, during which she discovers Moon, the youngest member of a globally famous boy band. She is immediately obsessed, writing fanfiction where you can insert Your/Name (Y/N), and then suddenly Moon leaves the band, and she ends up on a quest to South Korea to search for her obsession at the cost of everything else.

This book is a fascinating idea: turning the story of fandom and obsession into surreal literary fiction that questions identity, self, and what obsession and love really mean. Initially, it can be hard to pick out quite what it is going on, as the book is dreamy and disjointed, purposefully not really telling you that much about the narrator as she doesn’t feel any need to tell you much beyond her obsession, and once you start getting snippets of her self-insert fanfiction as well, which is even weirder, some people may find it too much. However, I really liked how you drifted through the prose, with a lack of control that feels like what she encounters as she feels like she must find Moon, that she is destined to know him because she’s the only person who understands.

The book also has some interesting commentary on the globalisation of K-pop and fandoms, in terms of languages, origins, and even authenticity of self and what that might mean in different places. This all links together with identity and loneliness, and the narrator’s strange connections with people as part of her quest to be closer to Moon, to find him and settle what she sees as a key part of herself. I imagine that a lot of people would expect quite a different style of book to be about fandom culture, maybe one that delved more into the specifics and commentary on fans, rather than more of a boundary-less journey into the surreal world of one woman, but it works effectively for me to question what people really use to give meaning to their lives and how hard it can be to express that, as the narrator struggles to really explain clearly what her obsession is about.

I enjoy this style of literary fiction and the subject matter brought a fresh angle to the book. It’s a short novel that’s easy to read in a couple of sittings and once you get into the style and the fact that you might not always know what is going on, there’s a lot to get out of it.

Mrs S by K Patrick

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Mrs S is a simmering novel about a love affair between staff at a girls’ boarding school. The narrator has moved from Australia to England to work as the matron at a boarding school, where she finds herself an outsider, not only in accent, but in being obviously queer. She becomes fascinated with Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, who seems so different, and yet they are drawn together, eventually starting a secret affair over the summer, but they have to decide what it means for them.

I keep hearing about this book and it lives up to the hype, written in a beautiful way that defies specificity (for example, no characters have names—Mr and Mrs S being the closest—and all of the students are just Girls) and yet tells a very particular story of butch identity and embodiment. Though the love story is the titular focus and centre of the plot, the book also tells a story of a butch lesbian finding both community, through a fellow staff member, and more of a sense of herself and how she wants her body to be. The rigid structures of the school serve as a backdrop to this more fluid, queer sense of being, and the students’ transgressions against the rules, whether justified or unjustified rules, bring a parallel sense of roles, rules, and defiance.

As a literary love story, readers might focus on the writing and fluid style, but it feels that the depiction of queerness and butchness is particularly crucial and the style cannot be separated from that. Mrs S is a book to languish with, yet with plenty to think about.

No Trouble At All edited by Alexis DuBon and Eric Raglin

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No Trouble At All is an anthology of horror stories centred around politeness in various forms, from the hidden violence that comes with a polite veneer to strange promises you might be drawn into and forced to comply with. The fifteen stories within the collection are quite varied in terms of what ideas of politeness, polite society, or hospitality they engage with, far more than I expected when I came to the book with an image of unnervingly polite characters hiding terrible horrors in my head. There’s a lot of engagement with how other people treat you and how you treat other people, again in a range of ways, and what is most notable across the stories is the kinds of relationships and what goes said and unsaid in the name of politeness.

The stories vary in terms of the forms of horror they involve, and I did prefer some of the more extreme ones, like ‘Anger Management’ about a family with a strange method of dealing with stresses in their life, as I found the concept really stood out and it really explored what might be required to stay ostensibly polite to others. The ideas of promises and contracts also plays out in stories that look at deals with demons—I really liked how ‘Acid Skin’ told the story of an unusual wish in a contract that goes in a very different way to how you might expect, twisting the typical narrative of wishing for something with obvious downsides. The closing story, ‘Welcome to the New You’, offers something that’s more of a dystopian horror and it is interesting how the theme of the anthology, politeness, plays into it without being the main plot point.

Some of the other stories were less engaging for me personally, as the stories are quite varied and some didn’t quite grip me with their concept or execution in the sharp way I tend to like from a short story, especially a horror story. Probably other people will like these more, as it is often true of anthologies that everyone likes different stories within them. The polite horror concept is definitely an interesting one, looking at the undercurrents running beneath politeness or societal expectations, and whilst I would’ve preferred it to have more dark stories in it, I appreciate how there’s got to be a fair number of stories with more lingering horror that lurks underneath the veneer.

The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson

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The Shadow Cabinet is the second in Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series, following on from the first book left off in this alternate modern day where there are witches and warlocks secretly living around the world. Book one’s cliffhanger becomes some of the focus of this one, as Ciara is now impersonating her sister Niamh to try and work out why she was helped to come back, as well as keeping Theo, Elle, and HMRC off the scent about the truth of who she is. There’s also the warlock Dabney Hale, escaped and after power, so Leonie sets off after him to try and find her brother. And then there’s the bureaucracy of HMRC and the Shadow Cabinet, where the British government actually know about the existence of witches.

Just like the first book, there’s a lot packed into this one, with chapters from a range of characters’ points of view and lots of threads to follow. The narrative starts slow, with a lot needing to happen and be set up before the big conclusion to the book, and then starts to pick up later on, before a climax that resolves more than I expected for a second book in a series, whilst still leaving plenty of loose threads (and a cliffhanger, like book one) for the next one. It takes a while to understand how the title is going to come into play, and it’s a nice element that it vital to the plot, but also doesn’t appear that much as there’s so much else going on.

The book focuses a lot around misogyny and, like book one found ways of both explicitly and implicitly tackling transphobia, The Shadow Cabinet does similarly with misogyny and with what can be broadly termed the ‘manosphere’, with multiple groups of men who think their beliefs about the place of women and witches to be correct. The uneven power between witches and warlocks is particularly interesting, and though it wasn’t delved into that much, it would definitely be something to address more in book three: magic in the books is very binary and even unfair, and it would be good to see more about that, as it is clear characters have different view about it.

As there’s so many characters and so much going on, you see varying amounts of each of them and their inner lives and motivations. Ciara is central to this book and I really enjoyed her story, as it brought in layers of complex morality and questions of agency that stands out against the black and white morality at points in the first book. I liked the use of demon summoning as something akin to alcohol or drugs in terms of being addictive and a way to escape your reality, and it would be really interesting to see more of the darker side of this series. Unsurprisingly given Dawson’s YA skills, Theo and Holly are some of the best characters, though they don’t get a huge amount of plot in this one, but it seems like that may change for book three.

As someone who isn’t a big fan of fantasy, I appreciate how Dawson weaves together the magical and non-magical worlds in this series, combining interpersonal drama (that always ends up relevant to the main plot, too, in some way or another) with big dramatic magic stuff. The worldbuilding comes up when needed, but I could enjoy this one without remembering every detail from the first book.

The Shadow Cabinet is a solid sequel that really follows on from Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, but also adds in some deeper exploration of the divided world of the books. I enjoyed the darker directions it went, particularly due to having Ciara as a main character, and I hope the aftermath of the events continues to be explored in the next one and the morality is messy and complicated, as it brings a lot of depth to something that could otherwise just be a straight ‘good’ and ‘evil’ story. Also, I hope Leonie and Chinara catch a break at some point!