Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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EC: My partner spent his teenage years in Scarborough, his parents still live there, and we’ve got a lot of friends from there, so I was pulling on weird little anecdotes that I’ve heard. Witness statements, which sit alongside transcripts of podcast episodes, text conversations and Carelli’s prose, are not always labelled with a character’s name. My decision to [set it at the same time as the referendum] was actually related to the Suzanne Capper murder that Penance is roughly based on.

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. We are made suspicious of Carelli from the very first page: the book, now reissued, was initially pulled from shelves six months after publication, following accusations by his interviewees that he had misrepresented and fabricated content. Even at the magazine’s headline celebration event, Clark was repeatedly asked why she was there: “‘I’m on the list!Dolly, the prettiest of the murderers-to-be, is admired when she arrives in Crow, but soon acquires the nickname “Dolly D--k Pig”, because of her penchant for dispensing oral sex in exchange for money and drugs.

We only need to look at the political dissent of a lot of terminally online young men in the last ten years, in terms of the fascist resurgence: a lot of people descending from being irony-poisoned to just being out-and-out racist. So far Clark has chosen to apply her formidable talent to fiction’s ethical problems and possibilities. One of those questions has a clear, comforting answer and the other is very upsetting and unsettling but is potentially more important to think about. Eliza Clark: I think irony-posting and irony-poisoned internet use are really interesting social features. He makes those crimes feel inevitable by stacking up the circumstances; so much of true crime is salacious – it isn’t interested in what makes [perpetrators] that way.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. Penance can be difficult to follow and the effect is disconcerting, which, you come to feel, is exactly what Clark wants.

You really had to be there to understand just how strange this time was for so many teenagers growing up in a time of mass political disarray, climate change, social unrest, and the simultaneous rapid growth of the internet. I really appreciate those stories and those journalists that don’t necessarily seek to stick a neat conclusion on it.That novel had a difficult heroine, a photographer who was once hot stuff in London, but now combs Newcastle for men she can persuade to pose for explicit pictures.

I’m interested in the way people, especially young people, will project onto fictional characters or even real people to explore their own trauma and feelings. It’s in these sections, where internet sites are shown to be dangerous spaces where violent tendencies go unchecked, that Clark is most scathing. It was one thing when it was a niche community, and it’s another now that it’s this mainstream multi-million-dollar industry.Remember how it was pulled because of the controversy over the way he obtained some of his material? Clark beautifully captures the feelings of isolation, anxiety, dread, and sorrow felt by so many young people who lived much of this time online. I thought the teen girls and their relationships were so well depicted and showed how bullying, gossip and ‘mean girl’ attitudes can quickly escalate to much worse.