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Although Clark’s second novel Penance takes quite a different approach to her first one (don’t go into this expecting Boy Parts 2.0), her debut gives enough of a hint that she knows how to make a novel like this work.

Relayed by a journalist using witness accounts, interviews, news articles, podcast transcripts, tumblr posts, and correspondence, Penance tells the story of the shocking and gruesome murder among teenagers in a sleepy northern seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote. Needless to say, the social and political context of the novel sets it up for a lot of interesting commentary, and Clark definitely delivers on this front. The setting of the northern seaside town, Crow-on-Sea, allows Clark to explore the decay of the north/seaside towns, and how dangerous the political and class divides of these towns can become when left to fester.

Alongside this, Penance also provides an unflinching and disturbing look at what has become the true-crime industrial complex, specifically in relation to internet fandom culture. Clark captures the pure malice and nastiness of 2010s internet culture in such a way that you simultaneously recoil in horror and laugh at how accurate it is. She is one of the few authors I’ve read who write about the internet in an authentic way, you can really tell she was in the trenches of Tumblr like the rest of us.

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.

The characterisation is brilliant, specifically in terms of how Clark writes the teenage characters navigating the discomfort of adolescence and trying to forge a sense of self in a small, suffocating seaside town (relatable). She also perfectly, and horrifyingly, captures the cruelty of teenage female friendship groups and how awful teenagers can be to one another.

All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world.

Thank you Faber & Faber for the advanced copy! Penance comes out in the UK on 6 July.


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this is gonna be a tough one for the chronically offline (aka normal people who didn’t have their teenage brains rotted by tumblr and the internet) to understand.