As a teenage goth in Newcastle upon Tyne, Eliza Clark would fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes in her bedroom while tuning into lurid true-crime podcasts with an avidity she now calls “prurient”. The 29-year-old, recently named on Granta magazine’s prestigious once-a-decade roll of best young British novelists, suspects that was how she first encountered the horrifying case of Shanda Sharer, a US schoolgirl tortured and burned alive by four teenagers in 1992, two years before the author was born. It stuck: Clark’s new novel, Penance, styled as a true-crime story, centres on the grisly murder of a teenager set on fire by three of her schoolmates in a North Yorkshire seaside town on the night of the Brexit vote in 2016.
“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places,” Clark says, sitting down with me in a park near her south London home as a heatwave brews. “True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.” The “junk” podcasts she feasted on in her youth were a gateway in adulthood to the forensic heft of genre classics such as Brian Masters’s “She Must Have Known”: The Trial of Rosemary West. “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.”
Reading Masters put Clark in mind to concoct a murder narrative that would double as a sociopolitical excavation of small-town history. More intricate than her 2020 debut Boy Parts – a sleeper hit thanks to TikTok – the skin-prickling result is a pitch-dark mosaic of murky families and deadly frenemies, chronicling the slow decline of an ill-omened holiday resort with supernatural chills and metafictional twists; think The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer crossed with Mean Girls as told by Gordon Burn, if Burn – another Newcastle writer drawn to crime – had lived long enough to turn his laser-like gaze on the dank crevices of the web.
Adolescence is trauma, the novel seems to say; was it thus for Clark? “I didn’t set anyone on fire,” she says, deadpan behind leopard-print shades. Nor did she fall, like one character, into the online abyss of school-shooter fandom (not an invented subculture, in case you’re as sheltered as I am). “It’s just a horrible time, isn’t it? You behave and look worse than at any time in your life; but apart from all the hormonal stuff, your unstable sense of self combines with a lack of full understanding of consequence and permanence,” she says.
