In the fictional northern UK town of Crow-On-Sea, on the eve of the country’s 2016 Brexit vote, a grisly murder takes place. Three teenage girls lure their classmate, 16-year-old Joni Wilson, to a deserted beach chalet where she is tortured, doused with petrol and set on fire.
Several hours later, Joni staggers into a nearby hotel. She is fatally injured, but is somehow – crucially – able to name her attackers before losing consciousness.
It’s a scenario recounted in the opening pages of Penance by the book’s narrator and struggling true-crime writer, Alex Carelli. Carelli’s methods are as unsavoury as his material: for him, Joni’s murder is an underreported “lucky find” on a trashy news website. “Depraved and grotesque was exactly what I was looking for,” he admits to the reader. “My last two books had not sold well.”
If all this sounds sickening, read no further. Penance is a confronting novel that probes society’s dark corners – internet subcultures, troubled youth and the rise of violent crime as popular entertainment – by an author for whom darkness is familiar territory.
Newcastle-born Eliza Clark was recently named, alongside Eleanor Catton, as one of Granta’s best UK writers under 40. Her surprise hit debut novel from 2020, Boy Parts, featured a heroine whose work as a fetish photographer allows her to prey on her unsuspecting young male models. In Penance, Clark’s second novel, this idea that women – especially young women – are capable of deliberate violence is once again in focus.\
This time, Clark dons the coat of her dodgy narrator to take the reader on an “investigation” of Joni’s murder. Carelli interviews understandably reluctant parents, peers and teachers of both the murderers and the victim; his raw material includes witness accounts, news articles, podcast transcripts, Tumblr posts and, somehow, prison correspondence. As the work progresses, his reportage shifts from professionally detached to increasingly fictional – a move designed, he explains, to “give the reader an emotional insight”.
If he is to be believed, all three of Joni’s murderers are at fault. Each is scrambling to find purchase in a fickle peer group; claws are out long before any violence occurs. Even victim Joni, a bullied child “with milk teeth like little white needles”, becomes a teenager who betrays her sole loyal friend. The adults in the girls’ lives, meanwhile, remain baffled and ashamed by the horror that has unfolded. How did it happen on their watch?
For readers of a certain age, Penance might contain echoes of the Parker-Hulme murder, the 1954 Christchurch matricide explored in Peter Jackson’s 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures. There’s certainly a recognisable adolescent angst at work in the untangling of Joni’s murder, as one young Crow-on-Sea witness explains: “There’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager. It’s the most traumatic time in loads of people’s lives, and even the most mentally healthy and put-together adults are still … there.”
But there’s more at play. The vulnerable girls’ online experiences – sinister games with modifications allowing “extreme violence” and “fandom” sites in which school shooters and serial killers are idolised – shift the trauma a notch. Adding to the sense of doom is the reality of Crow-on-Sea’s stifling parochialism, with its creepy history of witch-killing and Viking ghosts.
For the reader, too, there’s a nagging unease as the novel gathers pace. Penance is horribly compelling, despite its untrustworthy narrator. Where does the burden of truth in “true crime” ultimately lie? And what does it mean when our entertainment depends on a supply of increasingly shocking non-fiction violence to exist? It’s challenging stuff, if you have the stomach for it.
Penance, by Eliza Clark (Faber, $36.99)
