Then, when they were in the process of being caught for abuse and neglect, they drove all of the children off a cliff, including themselves.

The book eviscerates “true crime” at a time when TV documentaries and podcasts about modern history’s cruellest serial killers are rife. As the book’s faux-journalistic investigation uncovers every inch of Joan’s death, the accumulated detail can feel hollow. That’s where the idea of a crime getting buried by a story that is dominating the news cycle came from. I don’t want to do a pearl-clutching, ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children’ kind of thing, but I do think we’ve got this incredibly powerful, society-up-ending tool that we don’t properly know how to use.A wickedly clever deep dive into the nastier corners of the national psyche - you've never ready anything like this. Monroe has a whole section on the Columbine fandom which really helped me get more of a handle on the kind of personality who is drawn to that stuff. BP: There’s also all the weird serial killer stuff that was on Tumblr though, like I remember the Jeffrey Dahmer flower crowns and the weird fandom around the Columbine dudes.

this is an impressive piece of fiction set against the addictive backdrop of a faux true crime narrative. Clark credits that CV with showing her how precarious and rejection-laden writing can be; it meant she entered the industry under no illusions.

I’m interested in the way people, especially young people, will project onto fictional characters or even real people to explore their own trauma and feelings. Crow is tainted by its connection to a predatory sex offender named Vance Diamond, a Jimmy Savile stand-in with a meticulously described BBC game show of his own.

He makes those crimes feel inevitable by stacking up the circumstances; so much of true crime is salacious – it isn’t interested in what makes [perpetrators] that way. Also woven in are some very British elements, like in Boy Parts: the backdrop of Brexit and one of the characters having a UKIP father, the class divides in a small town, the legends and histories of a fading seaside town, abuse scandals from former entertainers. The narrator of my novel manages to paint quite a neat picture in the end and I liked the idea of pulling that away and saying ‘look, everything you’ve read has potentially been bollocks’. 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.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. In 2023, Boy Parts helped land Clark on Granta ’s once-a-decade list of the best young British novelists. I wrote the first bits of Penance in late 2019 and then I didn’t really touch it until after Boy Parts had come out, so late summer 2020.

I am a big fan of Eliza Clark’s previous novel, Boy Parts, and I think that I love Penance even more! There's much to think about here from the ethics of true crime, the impact of trauma, occult online followings and Brexit politics. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. Then, I read In Cold Blood while I was writing Penance , and I was really interested in reading afterwards that Capote had actually fabricated a lot of the material. Carelli has taken it upon himself to be the definitive chronicler of the arson murder in Crow-on-Sea.These present young men speculating with varying levels of sexual excitement about why Joan was set on fire. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer ‘I’m not just some one-trick pony’: Eliza Clark at home, June 2023. It was one thing when it was a niche community, and it’s another now that it’s this mainstream multi-million-dollar industry. EC: Yeah, I only peripherally remember the true crime stuff, like every now and then you’d see a post from the weird side of Tumblr, and you’d be like, oh, OK.