On the night of June 23rd, 2016, in the down-at-heel North Yorkshire seaside town of Crow-on-Sea, three teenage girls (Angelica, Violet and Dolly) kidnap, torture and murder one of their classmates: Joan (Joni) Wilson. All three are caught, tried and jailed, but because the attack coincided with, and was overshadowed by, the Brexit vote, the case never really stirs up any significant media attention – at least, not until the global true crime community belatedly catches its scent, which in turn causes disgraced former journalist Alec Z. Carelli to latch onto Joni’s story. Carelli decides to write the definitive study of the Crow murder, planning to reignite his own career by drawing attention to how true crime itself, as a cultural phenomenon, was a key factor in Joni’s death. The result is Carelli’s Penance: part interview with the perpetrators and their friends and family, part memoir, and part narrativisation of the key events leading up to Joni’s murder. But Penance, by Eliza Clark, is also the framing of Carelli as a liar and a fraud who manipulated his evidence and witnesses and used Joni’s tragedy as a way to launch himself as a serious writer, Capote-style. The novel as we read it, then, is packaged as a reprint of a cynical attempt by a one-time phone-hacker to reinvent his career: a purported non-fiction novel bookended by an editorial preface and an interview with a hostile Carelli himself. It’s very velar: making entertainment from death is a Bad Thing! And yet here we are, Clark’s readers, lapping up Joni’s/Carelli’s story: what did happen? Who was the ringleader? So pause after you read this: hands up who’s not complicit in the mass-marketisation and romanticisation of murder?
Penance is thematically and structurally complex. It’s easy to forget, reading it, that this is Carelli’s packaging of the (fictional) events around Joni’s death: we read the girls’ story as wildly entertaining, well, entertainment, just as Carelli (and Clark) intended. But so then we’re kind of morbid, right? Okay, it’s fictional, but as soon as you remember the Carelli plot, it becomes increasingly impossible to read it with a clear conscience: are the readers who long to get to the bottom of why Dolly/Violet/Angelica did this awful thing any different from the kids in these pages (and in real life) who ship school shooters and add flower crowns to re-blogged photos of serial killers? What we’ve got here, then, is a super smart novel exploring western society’s avaricious lapping up of real-life violence as entertainment in the form of true crime books, podcasts, TV shows, websites (‘DethJournal’) and fanfiction. All three perpetrators are caught up in dark online lives and fixations: Angelica, a bully and a victim of bullying, the widely-disliked daughter of a prominent right-wing Brexiteer (who’s BFFs with a Jimmy Saville-a-like character), is convinced that she can speak to the spirits of the dead and use this power to channel evil; social outcast Dolly is a ‘creeker’, a fangirl obsessed with school shooters, who want to bring about hell on earth as did Matty, her favourite teen mass murderer; Violet, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and bullying, and a former pal of Joni’s, uses dodgy mods for SIMS 4 to create a secret online torture chamber, and will do and say anything to keep from being ostracised by the other two. Carelli is, of course, quick to highlight the problematic online romanticisation of mass murder as well as the broadening intersection between local occult histories (ghost tours) and the true crime industry. But Clark’s novel reminds us that Carelli’s own narrative is deeply problematic in turn: he sells his shtick directly to these communities, profiteering on their misanthropy, even as he claims an artistic high-ground. And where does Penance itself sit? As a novel that’s commenting on all of this while telling a rollicking good story (an extremely convicting tale of contemporary teen friendship and bitchiness and isolation) it positions its readers as just as complicit in the consumption of murders like Joni’s as the likes of Carelli and the true crime podcast hosts and tumblr obsessives pilloried in the book. I mean, sure, Clark’s dealing in fiction – but would you pick this up if you weren’t already interested in true crime? How do you feel now, eh?
Any Cop?: A fiendishly clever exploration of our darker impulses, problematic publishing, toxic friendships, seedy coastal town, and right-wing British culture. Boy Parts was great but this should capture a wider audience.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 