Penance

rambly & pointless personal text ahead..

oh yeah, eliza clark is a real one. there's so much to compliment here but. jesus. for one i started reading this last night but its similarity to a real life murder that i learned from the movie ‘the world is full of secrets' made me stop and then think about that movie and then think about my personal kind of a brush with this tc world and i had to put my kindle down. but after picking it back up this morning i couldn't stop reading as all the podcast transcriptions (very expertly used, ads included), tumblr posts, discord messages, a hobby drama type of expose, rpf fics.. started pouring in. and all so very well written. if you've been around those places, if you've been in one of those communities or even lurked, you know how it is. penance both rewards and punishes you for knowing what it is talking about - and that's just one of the reasons why it works. this book opens with a note that penance by alec z. carelli has been removed from shelves, but that it was also being presented in its entirety because what's the point of whitewashing these things. that alone sets you on the edge, and as the book goes on you don't entirely forget it, but you keep questioning everything you're reading. for me, while i read, i was instantly suspicious of the prose fiction style parts. i have read some true crime, not a lot and i'm no expert, but i've always been annoyed at the fiction style books. ann rule's books are fantastic, sure, but they read like fiction and that bothers me. i'm mentioning an actual good writer here tho. this was also partly why teenage me hated in cold blood (which is obviously mentioned and it's the preface of this book). i can't explain why exactly.. carelli here says true crime is boring in itself. i don't know. maybe i simply prefer research style nonfiction. carelli structures his book in parts that focus on each of the girls involved in the case. he starts with the victim, then goes through the assailants (there's a very deliberate reason why he chooses the order of which girl he writes about i feel). and so each chapter starts with a transcription, usually a podcast that rings very true because there are indeed people out there talking about murder just like that - the last podcast on the left equivalent is here called i peed on your grave. and then a bit of my personal favorite part of a nonfiction work like true crime, where the author describes their research & interviews (i'm genuinely more interested in the mundanity of research as opposed to the facts so maybe that's why i don't read a lot of tc). here you go with the author to the location, as he attempts to contact people who knew these girls, their families & friends. they are interviewed, and sometimes those interviews are cut by a piece of writing by the girls themselves, presented to us as personal correspondence that the author had with them. and then after this bit of nonfiction (that still has some fictionalized bits here and there), another section of the chapter starts: the fully fictionalized one. like i said, i tend to lose interest fast when i start a nonfiction book and it reads like fiction. not always, but i find it difficult to allow myself to immerse in the narrative. it's different from a movie where facts matter very little to me. and so when the first fictionalized section began i was very suspicious already. how much of this was true? how much had carelli talked to the encarcerated girls? how much had they spoken? at points he even fictionalizes the girls' parents thoughts about their in-laws and their childhoods. but as the book goes on, that's the pattern it follows. we get some interviews, some of which carelli gets very strangely involved in (interviewing a woman who said she witnessed her half sister being abused by her father, carelli decides he needs to point out that sometimes dads just like to visit their kids bedroom at night). it might seem like quite a task for all of these voices & narratives to work, but eliza clark does it. i was a teen girl on tumblr, i am an adult woman on tumblr, and the tumblr sections are particularly well written. clark does something similar in boy parts with irina checking her roommate's blog every once in a while. here, we are presented some retrieved posts and anon asks of three of the girls who had a blog. two of them were in the true crime side. one of them, violet, is clearly a sixpencee (?) type. she liked to write text posts about true crime stories around her hometown. i can visualize her posts so easily. the type of long post with images and sections that would show up on your dash and you'd maybe start reading but lose interest and scroll past. another is much deeper into the tc community, she's a shipper and writes real person fics about a couple of school shooters. the way eliza clark writes dolly's rpf and her fights in the comments about how her interpretation of these boys/men is OOC because dolly is, in parts, writing about herself.. jesus. as a very depressed edgy teenager i also thought why the hell not and created my own new account where i would follow those depressed aesthetic blogs that only posted black and white. i'd look up tags of stills of movies like begotten and pictures of actual corpses that were somehow posted there. there wasn't any method to this blog, i'd log in when i was down and just reblog a few things and dip. i didn't have mutuals or a following, that wasn't really the point. but i was on tumblr when the true crime community - more so than simply edgy b&w aesthetic blogs - was getting bigger and starting to show up on people's dashes and tags. the blogs dedicated to the Psychology of true crime. people with bundy or dahmer urls who would write lenghty replies to asks about why did they do this and how did this happen. even the edits with flower crowns mentioned in the book. i'm sure i had a dahmer tag at some point. when girls at the end of the book post pictures of dolly & violet and fawn over them how could i not be reminded of people who fawn over parker and hulme (or their fictional versions). being around all of that as a very depressed teenager was surely a time. i too probably thought it went along with all the other history posts in my blog - the creekers in this book mention the historical value as well, ha. i didn't know podcasts then but violet's account of going through wikipedia and then from there reading everything she could find rang very familiar (i found myself in jack the rippers wikipedia page when i was about 11 and i printed the whole thing and brought it to school bc i wanted to see if i could figure out who he was). i remember buying a true crime book and marking names in the summary for the most fucked up stories and showing to my friends in school. that kind of stupid shit. the community online was scary tho and as i started therapy (at one point when i was 15 i asked my therapist if it was ok if i looked at pictures of dead people and she said it was fine as long as i wasn't getting excited by it which was a very odd conversation and one that i wish i could forget lol) and started taking meds i deleted that one sad blog. my personal tumblr was more dedicated to old movies and i started getting more into it when my depression was bad so i switched all gears into being annoying about cinema instead. there's even some of that in here with angelica's obsession w/ musicals - being on tumblr when les miserables came out was unbearable. speaking of this very straight teen girl, i didn't even mention jayde yet. jayde, like the other girls, was in this group for lack of an accepting group of friends. the boys only let her play w/ them if she was 100% good. the kids in school didn't know what to make out of her. jayde's narration (through carelli's eyes) mentions liking the attention from dolly and the idea/image of a girlfriend more so than any real affection for dolly. jayde wasn't very online (she was a reddit user i believe) but her relationship with dolly reminded me of some i witnessed on my dash through my teen years. jayde is visibly gay and so she's an object of desire by the questioning girls at school, regardless of who jayde actually was like and what were her interests. one gets a feeling that joni really did try to get to know her, but of course that didn't get very far.. another thing that got me was violet's sims playing. she mentions modding for the sims at one point and hey, so have i. sims players like to joke about their murder tendencies and eliza clark uses the game here to let us see a bit of violet's state of mind. she creates a kidnapping/murder scenario by using some mods. while social workers aren't a thing in ts4 (sorry, eliza!), the extreme violence mod and even the brief mention of a nsfw mod that allows incest and other things shows how well eliza clark knows what she's talking about. returning to the narrator.. carelli mentions he lost his daughter to suicide. she too had a tumblr, which he apparently logged into and saw her askbox and how little people interacted with some of her sadposting. she was a victim of a tumblr call out because her father was involved in the phone hacking scandal in the uk (he says he wasn't really, but he was a true crime reporter so i can't say i buy that especially considering what we later learn about how he got some of the sources used in the book). apparently if your dad is an asshole you can't make posts asking for financial help anymore.. being on tumblr when this whole thing imploded was kinda scary, and this bit in the book is both haunting and sad. carelli used the death of his daughter (which he never really involves himself in, beyond the call out she suffered that was related to him) to get sympathy and interviews. he also lost his child, he knows the pain and he wants to help parents tell their side of the story. when some of the characters mentioned this i was reminded of maggie nelson's the red parts where she talks about saying yes to some true crime show about the death of her aunt because she knew if she didn't they could just say whatever. it's true crime media so they could and will just say whatever though, regardless of the victims' families involvement. won't they? carelli acts like his book will be the definitive one and that that should be enough. but we know that isn't true. and we also learn that he was actually planning on writing a book about his daughter. one can only imagine how that would be like. i quite enjoyed the back and forth at the end where both eliza clark and carelli try to argue about the nature of a true crime novel and its relation with fiction. clark of course takes from real life when writing this book. but the things she actually delves deep into - the murder, dolly's favorite school shooting case, even the town - are all made up. we may know what they are based on, but they aren't real. i don't think she has an answer or that this book is fully judgemental of true crime. she knows what she's talking about bc surely she's been around these corners, as have i, as have a lot of people who will pick this book up. why do i prefer certain types of representation and not others? you could say that an exploitation movie for example released very shortly after a crime is only abhorrent, and that is true (it's in the name). i could also watch it, depending on the movie and the crime. why not! maybe i ask for more of the nonfiction books i read than the clearly fictional movies i watch. i'm not sure. i don't think one is more “correct” or “tasteful” than the other, though.. they all seem on the same level to me. some slogans you'll hear pretty often in true crime communities are that people are interested in the psychology, or that they are self aware fans!!! or they want to learn patterns so they can protect themselves (there's so much to be concerned about this notion lol), or that they focus on the victims so that makes it better! that's one thing that i find fascinating about the true crime people. nowadays the argument is that a new docuseries or movie or whatever should focus on the victims and make it about them instead of the killers. bc that makes it.. less salacious? less exploitative? but does it really? does exploiting someone's trauma automatically make it a good representation? this got me thinking of that hbo miniseries about the golden state killer. the women talking about their experiences made me cry a lot, especially in moments where they found relief in hearing each other and that they weren't alone. some of them were speaking about it for the first time. the series also had reenactments and it focused a lot on the writer of i'll be gone in the dark (a book i enjoyed precisely because it is so much about her research). surely this type of media may be seen as less exploitative if you put it next to idk the target of the moment like that dahmer show, but i'm not sure if i agree with that even if i enjoyed it! i think there's no way you can make something for profit like this without it being wrong - and that that in itself isn't a bad thing lol. in the novel i found that clark approaches this notion by giving equal weight to all of the involved: carelli structures his book in a way that we start with the victim, but then we learn more about each of the assailants. we start with joni and go on to the others, and so what's fresh in our minds is angelica being a weird lonely girl who is hated by all of her friends, violet's bad thing and her also being unable to make friends and her growing interest in morbid things, dolly and.. god, everything about her. joni shows up in each of these chapters, but more often than not on the side of the ‘bullies'. she's part of a friend group and she's trying to just be a kid. you can easily see why carelli was being sued (among other reasons). but how different would it really be if he spent more time talking about joni being a bullied child or about her parents' personal life? would that really make it less exploitative? what other lies would carelli have created to make joni seem like a ‘perfect victim'? the author makes it clear what he thinks of the spectacle that is true crime, but his reasoning sometimes feels so flimsy. it's his entire career! he's a self aware type. they will always be a bit flimsy, no matter how many self-help type speeches are given by true crime podcast hosts. i'm unsure what i want from these people lol. nothing really. the ones that are more upfront about their exploitative tendencies are rightfully criticized, but in a way.. at least they are saying it? who knows. the book even touches on the violent language used by these communities, though here mostly on the mouth of podcast hosts. i suppose a way of showing you are on the side of justice and the victims is to employ very graphic language about criminals. they would use the word cathartic here maybe but it's like.. who are you lol. what even is your relation to the story, wasn't this something you were merely curious about? who are you fighting for? comment sections on subreddits will often be like that, full of the same comments over and over. writing ‘the definitive book' doesn't seem to make that big of a difference in clearing out the air when it comes to some of the people involved in these stories. sometimes lives are changed forever regardless of the level of involvement someone had. all it takes is a group of angry people leaving their mark and others will find it and reproduce it forever. these communities will write their own narratives and even facts can turn meaningless if they don't fit the story they made up. or sometimes it makes everything feel hollow. i remember once reading about a woman's body that was found in the us. they only had the victim's teeth and apparently they were perfect. people online gave her a jane doe name, started trying to come up with theories about who she was, what was she doing in the area etc. why were her teeth so perfect? to many she was a dentist's daughter. the piece i read interviewed some of the people who would spend hours and hours theorizing about this one case. they had their own narrative, but after years her living relatives were found and turns out the story was incredibly sad, but quite simple. at one point in the piece they voice the feeling of emptiness they got after finally finding the truth. it was like.. now what? what to do? i find that so curious too. it makes sense why people name their podcasts something like ‘my favorite murder' as there are so many pet cases out there, and people latch onto them. i didn't talk much about the communities themselves though you see some of them in the book as well. using these real life cases as a way to have a group that share similar interests. to have a hobby. dolly talked to some creekers in private, even if she never opened up completely to others. i could go on and on even if i'm not saying much. i found this book very well structured & written. there's a lot you can take from it and all the points it touches. there are so many stories and legends scattered here, the way true crime brings tourists and becomes a part of the town's lore, reminding me of the true crime tours in places like wisconsin. the youtube videos of people going to these spots, keeping the legend alive. before we really get to know these girls we learn of other tragic stories like a drowning, or even a horrific cover-up of a pedophile philanthropist. they can all be connected if you use the right angle. there really is so much here, but it doesn't feel off or clunky. clark doesn't answer questions bc why should she, but she definitely makes you ponder a lot. and again i don't think she's wagging her finger here, that would make for a much less interesting book. she's instead also interested in all of This, the book seems like many conversations without a proper resolution. the journalists, man.. the phone hacking thing is mentioned only here and there bc we are reading carelli's words, but that says so much by itself. you can easily find online stories of journalists hacking phones and accounts while writing a moving piece or book, clark didn't have to make a lot up here. that's part of the fun of thinking about this book. i appreciated the different voices here after being in irina's mind and her mind only on clark's last novel. it was fun to see what else she can do and i'll be definitely checking out her future releases. i found that after finishing her books i feel a need to go right back to the start. reading this as i learned more about each girl i had to return to earlier chapters to see certain situations in a different light. real good stuff!!

so bizarre in its messiness—where was the editor for this one—and the final chapter (‘aftermath') just reads like an excuse as to why the entire book was written in the same, unpleasant tone. as of yet, i am not convinced eliza clark can write in any voice except her own (and as someone the same age that was also deeply on tumblr from 2010-2014, i'm not actually sure that voice is unique)