Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

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do you know what happened to her already? did you catch it in the papers? are you local? did you know her? BP: One thing I really loved about Penance was how much of early 2010s Tumblr you put in there. All the creepypasta stuff and references to Slenderman. I feel that was such a huge part of the adolescence of our generation. I absolutely love a book which has multiple perspectives, multiple data sources and timelines so I knew I would love this. I’m also a true crime cynic so I felt this was an intriguing concept from my perspective.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in these spaces, I found Clark’s rendition embarrassingly accurate. I don’t think any other author has ever managed to capture the exact tone and voice of a Tumblr community the way she did in this book. There were excerpts from fictional posts and conversations that made me laugh out loud for how closely they resembled the kind of delirious content you see every day on these platforms. I found myself both cringing away from and delighting in these sections of the story, but most of all, I was amazed at the author’s ability to faithfully re-create such very specific interactions in a different medium.

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.

Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power.’ What I personally found most disturbing was the characters’ sense of moral righteousness, their insistence that their own actions were invariably morally superior to those of the other people involved in the case. If you’ve spent any time on the internet or in the real world, you know that this is exactly how most people react to discovering that their mindless behavior has led to devastating consequences for someone else: they rush to create a self-absolving narrative that allows them to avoid accountability for what they did. 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! None of it worked for me. I kept putting the book down and it got to the point where I had to write a post-it with everyone's names and who they were because I kept forgetting (or didn't care enough to try to remember).Instead of English, she studied art, first in Newcastle then in London. No good at drawing – or so she felt – and “too shy” (unlike the narrator of Boy Parts) to ask people to pose for photos, she found that what she most enjoyed was writing a dissertation on how Michel Foucault’s ideas of surveillance play out in the online era. By day, she sold posh undies at Agent Provocateur, having previously worked in bars. Returning home on graduation meant pulling pints again (“there’s not a lot of luxury retail where I’m from”), but this time she wasn’t able to blag a drink on shift – a perk she’d enjoyed in London – and the bouncers were useless: “I’d be dead sober, there’d be a man sexually harassing me and my manager would be like, ‘Well, he’s a paying customer.’” 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. Barry Pierce: I feel Penance is coming out at a perfect time because it feels we are somewhat endlessly in a cycle where people are questioning the ethics of true crime, be it through books or through Netflix series. Was that on your mind when you were writing the book? EC: Very funny. It’s just two very funny words to put together. Actually, it was the donkey strangling that led me to giving the novel this British seaside setting. Also, the guy shooting seagulls with a crossbow, that was Scarborough. A disgraced journalist decides he wants to tell this story after hearing about it on a podcast. He heads to Crow-on-sea where he interviews family members of the victim and perpetrators, as well as other friends of the girls. He does a deep dive into the girls social media presence to try to really get a grip on the state of minds these young women had leading up to this heinous crime.