Tag: penance

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.