Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.” Alongside the crime focus is a detailed depiction of a small run-down coastal town situated between Scarborough and Whitby. The beats here are woven in seamlessly: from the Dracula connection of Whitby to the witch trials, to the local UKIP MP and a Jimmy Saville-alike abuser-in-plain-sight local 'hero'. EC: Well, I pinched a lot of stuff from Scarborough. My partner lived in Scarborough when he was a teenager, and his parents still live there. So, there are bits and bobs that are pinched from anecdotes and local news stories, like the donkey strangling stuff, that happened in Scarborough. Do you know what happened already?Did you know her?Did you see it on the internet?Did you listen to a podcast?Did the hosts make jokes? Penance is made up of different kinds of media. It’s set in the fictional town of Crow-on-Sea around the time of the Brexit referendum, with nonfiction elements woven in. Did that form and style come first or did writing about true crime sort of lend itself to that form? Or did it just sort of all come together naturally?

Now the Clark pipeline is running hot: as well as several screen projects she can’t discuss, she’s writing another novel (“a kind of speculative fiction thing”); in the autumn, there’s a stage adaptation of Boy Parts (which has also been optioned); and next year there will be a story collection “bouncing around” sci-fi and horror (one of the stories, She’s Always Hungry, is in the current issue of Granta; if you’ve read it and were left puzzled, Clark says 2,000 words were lopped off the end “in a way that may not be clear”, her admirably level phrase). The pastiche structure reminds me of recent banger True Story by Kate Reed Petty, or Carrie by Stephen King but, Eliza being Eliza, Penance is truly one of a kind. A compulsive rollercoaster of murder, 2010s internet culture, urban decay in the northeast, and the cruelty of adolescence. I was completely swallowed by it, and felt a morbid sorrow to see it end. Eliza is just so astute, and the examination of true crime is second to none. So there were some hits and some misses but in the end I am glad to have taken this twisted journey to the truth....or is it true? You be the judge. 3.5 stars!Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Disturbing and extremely captivating novel about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl by three teenage girls in a small seaside town in the north of England. The story is being told by a true crime journalist through historical research, interviews, podcasts, internet stuff, and correspondence with the killers themselves. Clark manages very well to draw you into this gruesome tale, but also shows excellently how complicated life can be for teenagers; with all the insecurities, wanting to belong, peer pressure, bullying, social media etc. On top of that, the ending is certainly surprising 😊

At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, sixteen year old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet. Her assailants were three other teenage girls - all four girls attended the same high school." If people read Penance and really enjoy discussion of the true crime phenomenon or industry, what would you recommend them to read or watch if they want to understand more?A brutal murder sits at the centre of Eliza Clark’s Penance. A group of teenage girls set another girl on fire. But the story doesn’t cause an outrage. It doesn’t hit the headlines. The Brexit vote is seen as a more pressing news item. Now, journalist Alex Z. Carelli has taken it upon himself to be the definitive chronicler of the arson murder in Crow-on-Sea. Clark’s novel is a metafiction, a pastiche of a true-crime book that includes witness interviews, extensive histories, podcast transcripts and more.

The narrative itself comprises a range of modes of writing: from podcast scripts to 1st person narrative from the author of the true crime book, to Q&A transcriptions of interviews and online message boards. My first and biggest complaint is that this book is much too long. Too much time was given to the towns history. I don't care about what Viking discovered it or how it got it's name.

In the end, I had expected this to be more obviously a representation of a manipulative fictional author and while there are gestures in the main body of the text, this aspect only really tops and tails the narrative. Instead, this is exhaustive on the lives of female adolescents treated in turn with all the daily fractures of friendship, and the influences that create their world from household secrets and pressures to online obsessions with killers.