I tell myself that I don't fall for BookTube hype, but I totally do. Case-in-point, the fact that I immediately loaned Penance [Eliza Clark] after watching one glowing review for it.
A 'true-crime' novel set on the night of Brexit, with an unreliable narrator? Sign me up.
Fortunately, it more-or-less lives up to several positive reviews I've since seen, though I think claims that it's got something truly deep to say about true-crime are wildly overstated. Is it a gripping, thought-provoking novel? Yes. Deep?
...Meh.
Penance is written in the style of a non-fiction true-crime novel. On the night of the Brexit referendum in 2016, three teenage girls kidnap and torture another girl, and then set a beach hut on fire to try and destroy the body. A journalist shamed in the infamous phone-hacking scandal then sees his opportunity to write a book about a crime largely overlooked by media.
We are told at the beginning that book is controversial, featuring inaccuracies and misbegotten information. Often the journalist writes long sections of made-up prose, which should give any non-fiction reader deep concerns as to where the material is coming from and how much artistic license is involved. It's a clever trick, adding emotion and readability to the book while forcing readers to analyse and question the way the information is portrayed.
The book begins with the brutal (and gory) facts about the events that happened on the night of the murder. From there we 'meet' the main players, and learn of their interconnecting relationships, full of teenage drama about who-locked-who in a toilet cubicle when they were nine and who-is-or-is-not in the pretty/popular group. We learn the culture of the town itself, the haves-and-have-nots, and the unique influences on the lives of that 2016 cohort of UK teenagers.
The town is as much of a character as the victim or her killers. It has been beset by tragedy from the first Viking invasion, to its witch hunts, the deadly hotel fire, and most recently the unsafe waterpark that killed a teenage girl. It's the hometown of a celebrated local legend who was revealed to be an abuser (a direct Jimmy Saville copy and paste) and now it's the centre of Brexit-England, with one of the killer's fathers being a Brexit mouthpiece-for-hire. All of these factors influence the lives of the group of teenagers involved.
The victim herself - Joan - is a ghostly presence. The 'writer' spends little time on her, because he knows that the audience wants the killers' perspectives, not hers. All we really know is that she was a slow-to-mature girl who suddenly became centre of the popular girls. She doesn't come across well, because her killers are in charge of her narrative, but in the few other accounts we get it's clear that Joan is no more messed up, cruel, saintly or strange than any other teenage girl.
For me the let down of this otherwise excellent book is the lack of clarity in what it was actually trying to say. I had hoped that the final 'author interview' in which the writer is confronted about his poor journalism would be a gut-punching end, and yet the punch never comes. The author is a shallow, unapologetic hack with pretentions of grandeur - James Somerton meets Piers Morgan. His actions don't materially change the book. He seethes at the two-faced, exploitative true-crime machine whilst openly using it for his own gain.
The author - the real one - like so many who write about true-crime, acts as if it was invented in the podcast age. As if women (because of course it's women) went through some sort of true-crime themed mass hysteria upon the release of Serial.
Whilst true-crime might have become fashionable for a while, it's been an industry since the Victorian era (when communication/police/medical/journalism advances went into overdrive). It's been the subject of obsession and fascination on a local level since pretty much the dawn of humanity.
As a guilty true-crime fan I have repeatedly examined my relationship with the industry. I always loved mysteries, and had been fascinated with Serial more for its leap into a new type of storytelling than its subject. I didn't really get into true-crime until after my father died. I sat around, in the wreckage of my life, and sought out the easiest content I could find. True-crime filled that hole, and over the next few years it became a comfort - my life was horrendous but it wasn't as bad as the things on my TV.
As I healed, my interest waned. Ironically my need for it was fading just as global trauma made the genre bigger than ever - with lockdown turning Tiger King into a far bigger hit than it deserved. Years later, I still have bad weeks - a recent upset led to me unthinkingly putting on 24 Hours in Police Custody, despite many hours of considering true-crime's uneasy relationship with copaganda.
We see the modern true-crime industry in its many forms here - the joke-cracking podcast guys, the dramatic tourguide, the (so he claims) carefully researched and politically nuanced journalism of the writer, the ancient folklore that is modified over and over to build an identity for the town, the Most Haunted TV shows that visit the hotel, and even the people who write into newspapers with silly ghost 'experiences' for a couple of quid. At the extreme end are the fandoms that obsess over school-shooters, of which so-called ringleader Violet is a member.
Surprisingly this book has very little to say about most of those formats - all painted as various versions of ignorant or hypocritical - but it's the latter subject that gets most sympathy.
The three killers are all using Tumblr fandoms as a way of coping with their loneliness. Two are harmless (a musical theatre fan plagued by anon drama and a borderline-cool gothic folklore account) but Violet's adoration for a pair of questionably gay school shooters becomes dangerous.
As well as being a true-crime buff, I've also been in fandom well over twenty years. I know nothing of school-shooter fandoms, but when it comes to fans in general, and Tumblr circa 2016 in particular, you won't get a more switched-on reader. The book helpfully explains fandom terms (BNF, fandom wank, etc) and I read those footnotes with delighted charm. Even when not outright mentioned, I understood the Reddit post's sneering attitude to 'Tumblrinas', and I recognised an AO3 layout even in audiobook form.
It's here the book becomes genuinely interesting because after decades in fandom, I know what a subtle line there is between fandom and obsession. Every fan has, at some point, gone a bit too far over that line when real life has become, for one reason or another, unbearable.
Fandom offers a cocktail of community, friendship, humour, creativity, and sexual content that can be addictive even when someone is happy and stable. When life gets rough it can be your only source of positivity or connection - so it makes sense to become increasingly invested and protective of it, even as you become detached from your real circumstances.
For example, where others turned to Tiger King in lockdown, I obsessed over The Walking Dead. Not in a weird way, but there were points where I'd finish a 300k fanfic and then just... start reading it all over again the next day. Of course, with time and perspective I was able to return to a more stable relationship with that fandom. I love it still, but it isn't what gets me through the day.
The Walking Dead fandom doesn't delight in the gory aspects of the show, it cares about the characters overcoming adversity and building relationships. To some extent Violet's school-shooter fascination isn't much different - she is more focused on the 'forbidden love story' between the shooters than the murders, and if it wasn't for the very real crime behind it, it wouldn't be considered particularly worrying.
Even though RPF (real person fiction) is much debated, 99.99% of writers know the difference between their fantasies and reality. In most circumstances the fandom might have just been an outlet for Violet's stress and anger, until she no longer needed it and found herself moving on. But when life becomes worse and worse, the obsession can grow and the person can lose their sense of perspective, which is something we see across all internet communities. For most people that can lead to some fandom ugliness and and increasingly small network of fans bonded together against other fans. In this case it leads to murder.
The problem is that whilst this is fascinating to me as a student of fandom, it still doesn't have much to say about it. Violet's obsession is handled with sympathy - even when sections of her terrible (My Immortal inspired) fanfiction are shared - but as with so much of this book it feels like there is no real point to it other than to sex up her crime. There are no dots drawn to suggest it truly caused her actions (and there is still no actual evidence she really was the ringleader of the attack.)
The only thing that this book seems to be clearly saying is that unquestioningly absorbing true-crime content twists the unthinkable into entertainment, where story matters more than truth, and the culprits matter more than the victims. The problem is that, despite me dwelling on this book for weeks, I can't make out a more complex message than that. I see fractions of meaning, hints at a bigger picture, but they never come together.
In the end I had no choice but to come full circle, and enjoy it for what it was on the surface - a story about murder. A very good one, gripping even, but no more. Maybe that was the whole point.
I write this blog purely for my own enjoyment, not to make a career or become a content creator. Even so, I put a lot of work into it. If you fancy supporting me on Ko-Fi, that would be incredibly cool of you!
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