The ethics of using real life violent crime as content canon fodder is one that I’ve always been of two minds about. On one hand, I’ve always been just as morbidly curious in the mechanics of which human beings find ways to hurt each other in the most extreme ways as anyone. I’ve read about my fair share of cases I’ve endlessly obsessed about, still find myself going down rabbit holes researching. I do see the merits in making dramas on subjects like real life serial killers like Netflix’s infamous *Dahmer* series. There were details of the case I had personally never heard discussed before (which, to be fair I had to Google to verify were true, and not exactly all of them were, persay) about some of the orbiting figures in Dahmer’s life. I never would have known to look up the very tragic real life story of Dahmer’s own murderer and the injustice he suffered (though that wasn’t covered much in the series itself.) With that said however, as someone who’s had personal experiences that, though not nearly as extreme, give me some approximate understanding of what it must be like for the friends, families and survivors shoved into the public consciousness as sacrifices to the entertainment gods. Having what was likely one of the worst moment of their lives given a sometimes global audience, more often than not without their full consent, possibly without even their permission at all— yeah, that does seem profoundly cruel.
After spending my childhood and teenage years watching talk shows make dancing monkeys out of brutalized abuse victims, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of shock site content I was way too young to be looking at, spending some of my young adulthood listening to every white woman with a half decent camera casually describe some of the most horrific cases while she did her makeup, I found myself pretty well done with true crime personally. The lack of genuine thoughtful deconstruction of the reasons why people inflict this much pain on each other, how quickly it all devolved into exploitation and rubber-necking, I just tapped out. That’s why, despite absolutely adoring Eliza Clark’s first novel *Boy Parts*, when I read the blurb on what *Penance* was about when it was released, I sat on it for a good few months. I immediately recognized the real life crime the bones of the plot is based off of, and it put me off. Which I submit to you now as my final thesis on why book blurbs need to git gud, because I’m pretty sure Clark shares my frustrations on the subject matter. I’ve now completed a second read through a couple months after my first, and I feel this may be one of my favorite novels of all time.
*Penance* is not only a masterfully written, absolutely haunting read, it functions as a exceedingly clever metafictial deconstruction of the true crime fad as a whole. It’s not just loosely inspired by one, but a whole plethora of real life famous cases, some of which are even mention directly in the narrative. Clark manages to expertly weave together several true events into one cohesive story. The novel obscures each just enough to keep away from making any false equivalencies in analogy to any real cases, while maintaining a brutal feeling of realism. It plays with the audience’s familiarity with one or more, if not most of the violent crimes it alludes to, creating this eerie sense of deja vu. Details of the narrative sound consistently farmiliar enough you’d swear you heard it before. On first read through the book even managed to trick me with one of it’s minor plot points involving a fandom centered around a school shooting. I was sure I had heard of it before— which the book lightly pokes fun at actually, there being so many school shooting in America now they’re blurring together. The setting itself is also crafted expertly to create this sense of familiarity. You may have never been to or lived in a dying British beach town, but some element of it’s characterization I’m sure will spark a connection in most people’s brains of knowing a place like it.
With this book along with her last I feel like Clark has truely solidified herself as something of a prominent voice of a generation— namely, mine. Zillennials who were raised on unrestricted internet access between the dying breaths of the online wild west and the rise in social media. That most of the references and humor rely on the reader’s familiarity with that general flavor of a chronically online lonely youth means some of it may not hit with all readers, but it had me pissing myself laughing at key moments. Furthermore, I feel it genuinely paint a raw, authentic experience of being a mentally unwell teenage girl left to rot quietly in a hostile community. Through the narrative’s thorough exploration of the three primary culprits responsible for the horrific murder of a fellow classmate’s metal states, you get three distinct ways the town itself and the small compounding failures of the adults around them fostered this series of events. It makes a compelling case it was almost inevitable. By crafting a story so reminiscent yet abstracted from real events, this novel feels a lot more like a meaningful examination of extreme violent crimes than most real coverage of it does.
The biggest surprise for me however was the thorough dressing down the journalist acting as the reader’s narrator gets in the text itself. The narrative sprinkles hints and details about his personal life that, though not in any way directly related to the plot, adds an intriguing secondary layer of examination that really makes this book something special. As a ride or die stan of the unreliable narrator, it’s great to see one taken to task for being unreliable in the text— I love it. He’s the source of the book’s biggest gut punch when it comes to satirizing the true crime genre. Though as a reader you can to some degree pick apart what elements of the novel were most impacted by his bias, as it roles to a close it leaves you with a lingering sense of unease. It denies you a sense of closure in the lack of confidence what truely took place. Clark, in a stroke of true evil genius, twists the knife with references to resources canonical in the novel with further (possibly more accurate) information is available that, of course, don’t actually exist— because this is fiction. This didn’t really happen. You’re left not really knowing.
This book isn’t one full of tense, brutal descriptions. It’s frontloaded with one absolutely gruesome chapter that flavors the mounting dread as it recounts the events that led up to that horrific scene, for a more subtle, but palpable disturbing read. It’s also somewhere between short and medium length, so you can get through it easily in one session if you’re a fast reader. Even if true crime isn’t your thing, I think it’s worth a read. If it is, I doubt you’ll walk away feeling judged or scolded for your taste in content— just provided with some interesting perspective to chew on. I highly recommend checking this one out.
by ThisDudeisNotWell