Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Penance is, first and foremost, a novel about crafting your own narrative. It features a gallery of varyingly unreliable, manipulative characters who—consciously or not—are all supremely concerned with creating a self-serving story to absolve themselves from any responsibility in the book’s central event, the gruesome murder of a teenage girl.

In her sophomore work, Eliza Clark demonstrates an exceptional ability to develop unique, convincing character voices that are as unsettling as they are realistic. This is a very dark novel, and yet every aspect of it is brought to life in vivid detail, as if the author had a profound knowledge of the setting, social dynamics, and cultural context these characters live in. Entire chapters are dedicated to the history and lore of the English coastal town where the events take place; long paragraphs are devoted to unravelling the intricate politics of teen friend groups; and, perhaps most surprisingly, great attention is paid to the structure and dynamics of online fandom spaces.

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.

I also really appreciated the commentary this book provided on the true crime industry. Clark has a talent for developing deeply flawed and unlikeable characters who completely lack self-awareness, to the point that they are oblivious to how awful their actions look to external observers. This, combined with the tonal dissonance that characterizes the true crime content satirized here (think podcast hosts making jokes about murder victims, or blog posts about how attractive serial killers look), gave the story a grotesque and often absurd quality.

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.

The only character who isn’t given a chance to construct such an alibi for herself is Dolly, the crazy girl, the one whose voice remains truly absent from the story. Dolly is the perpetual scapegoat, the deranged psycho, the black hole no one—not even a predatory journalist with a vivid imagination—can ever see through.
She is the real outcast in a book where everyone claims to be an outcast, and for this she will suffer the harshest punishment.