‘Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet?’… ’Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes? Do you have a dark sense of humour? Did that make it okay? … Did they give you a content warning? Did you skip ahead? Did you see pictures? Did you look for them?’
These questions from the beginning of Penance are striking, and what follows is the description of a truly harrowing crime. A girl burns to death in a boatshed in a seaside Yorkshire town, set alight by three of her teenage classmates. The crime occurs on the eve of the Brexit vote in 2016, thus avoiding significant attention until years later when it attracts podcasters and a disgraced tabloid reporter, whose book on the murder forms the bulk of the novel.
In profiling each of the girls, the novel is a grim tour of the gender, class, and political divides of a small town and of girlhood. It showcases folk horror of both the seaside town and the dark parts of the internet. Transgressive perhaps, but subjects are treated with the deft hand that they demand. It feels like it could only be written by someone young who was extremely online during the tumblr heyday, featuring edgelord fodder like school-shooter fandoms and creepypastas but also neopets.
Writing which heavily features the internet is so frequently cringe-inducing, but the book works because the online content is deeply fascinating and forms part of the broader landscape of media and malicious behaviour that Penance examines, ultimately asking us what we can and should believe. This is one of a handful of recent books that highlights the pervasive nature of crime reporting and indeed consumption; it’s an extremely effective and exciting read. Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts, was a sleeper hit, and happily has been picked up by Faber & Faber now for distribution in Australia for the first time, alongside Penance.
