There are problems. If you’re the kind of reader to wallow in a true-crime story, you’ll know there’s no shortage of real ones out there, and it’s hard to forget that this one is bogus. As the book’s faux-journalistic investigation uncovers every inch of Joan’s death, the accumulated detail can feel hollow. But while Clark also makes you collude in the dead-girl industrial complex – all those podcasts, all those Netflix series – with a novel that (you might argue) sits firmly within that complex itself, her skill means that she just about gets away with the crime. Penance is written with such intelligence and dark humour that it’s disturbingly hard to object. There’s a lot more work coming out in the past year or so about true crime as a phenomenon, whether that’s novels or nonfiction. How did you want or see Penance fitting into that discussion, or did it fit into this discussion more organically? In terms of internet culture, the novel explores how easily the online radicalisation of young, vulnerable people can occur, with fans in online fandom communities like tumblr feeding into each other’s obsession until everything starts to derail – and to what degree onlookers are complicit as they watch it all unfold in real time. Taking aim at our relationship with true crime, the brutality of teenage girls and classicism, it was easily my favourite read of 2023 so far.' @charlotte__reads_

Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself.

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 it bleeds, it leads. We know this only too well. Ours is a society that consumes as much violence as it does sugar. We are so inured to the effects of both that each hit must be greater than the last. In her first novel, Boy Parts, Eliza Clark gave us the female version of American Psycho. Her latest, Penance, is the story of a girl who is burnt alive and proceeds to stagger around a seaside town without any skin. Clark understands the rules of the game. The bloodthirsty are never quenched. I am so excited to even hear about Penance, but once I heard the premise and structure, I was fizzing with anticipation. Any lingering suspicions that Clark is a mere provocateur will be banished by Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. There’s none of the lazy writing that occasionally blemished Boy Parts (where one character is “pretty as a picture and thin as a rake” and, a few lines later, “flat as a board”). Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations. How many writers, for instance, would set their much-heralded new work in the unglamorous leave-voting northern town of “Crow-on-Sea”? It’s here that, a bogus foreword informs us, the action of the book we’re about to read – Penance by true-crime journalist Alec Carelli – takes place.Penance looks at the more extreme true crime fandom space, where people might write fanfiction about serial killers or school shooters. What made you want to look at that rather than just the more mainstream podcasts or YouTube side? There will be no upset loved ones –except perhaps those who were affected by the true crimes mentioned Three girls in a failing seaside town brutally murder a classmate in this (fictional) true-crime exposé. Andrew Hankinson is a freelance journalist and author. His new book, 'Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't', is out now. At its simplest, Eliza Clark’s second novel is a horror story. It centres around the tale of three teenage girls who murder their schoolmate, 16-year-old Joni Wilson.

You mentioned people taking part in serial killer fandoms in an ironic way, but it’s often difficult to work out what is ironic online: when is someone doing a bit or making fun of something and what is serious engagement with a belief, subculture or discourse. Maybe more so because I’d only just read Clark’s incredible Boy Parts last week, so my expectations going in were slighter higher than I thought they would be ? 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. Eliza Clark: Definitely Rachel Munroe’s Savage Appetites and Francisco Garcia’s We All Go Into the Dark . There is a really fabulous book about the Raoul Moat incident called You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) by Andrew Hankinson. And if people are looking for something else fictional there’s a really fantastic web comic by Max Graves, a really interesting trans comic artist – the first part of it is called Dog Names. It’s a character study of a teen boy who was caught up in a murder and he’s also chronically online and won’t get off Tumblr. I read it shortly after I finished Penance and was just blown away by how fresh and how interesting it is. I think someone should give him loads and loads of money for it.

speaking of maturity this book gets into so many things at once that I'm really not sure how she keeps any of it straight. it's about the ethics of true crime, the overall meanness and greed with which it's consumed, how much of it is not really about the truth at all. it's about small towns in decline. it feels trite to say it's About Girlhood but it is, every time she zooms in closer on the lives of these kids and the specific ways and times that they were all violent and all vulnerable, no excuse given or needed, it's just like that. layered over all of that we're thinking about our narrator the whole time and how he's even able to recount events in this much detail. how indeed. TW: Do you think a social media platform like Tumblr actually helps radicalise young people, and drive them to commit real acts of violence, as it does in Penance ? Even though the sole focus of this book is the crime itself, I could not help but be in awe at the amazing portrayal of the impact of the internet on young minds and how certain interests, while unique, can lead to terrible consequences.