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Notes -
I finished Penance. As I predicted, of the three female murderers, the third is also revealed to have been sexually abused as a child, meaning two of the three were definitely sexually abused as children by male adults, and the third may have been too (she's established to have been acquainted, via her father, with the universe's equivalent of Jimmy Savile). For those keeping score, of the female murderers in Clark's first two novels, 100% were either definitely or probably sexually abused as children or teenagers by adult male guardians.
The novel frustrated me more and more as it went along. When it works, it really works, with spot-on portrayals of the dynamics of friendship groups among teenage girls and the dark sides of Tumblr fandom culture. But there are so many pointless and irrelevant digressions that add nothing and go nowhere. For instance, one of the murderers is established to be an avid fan of two school shooters whose murder spree is a mish-mash of the Chardon high school shooting and Columbine (I vaguely recall Scott stating that the former case is what persuaded him that capital punishment has its uses). She writes creepy fanfiction about one of the killers, clearly projecting her own psychological issues onto him. Fine. But right at the climax of the book, Clark devotes several dozen pages to describing how this school shooting went down, in a town several thousand miles from the main action of the story, populated with characters we don't know. What's the point of this? What does it add to the story?
Then right at the end, it's revealed that the in-universe author of the true crime book we have ostensibly been reading up to this point may have embellished or invented some details about the events of the story. This was clearly intended as a postmodern "how much of what you've read is true???" moment, but by that point I didn't care. Whatever the in-universe "truth" of the story, I know that Clark thinks that the only reason a female person might murder someone is because they were sexually abused as a child. Beyond that, I don't think I need to know much else.
It's a curious example of a patched together from the headlines story. As mentioned above, one minor character is a transparent stand-in for Jimmy Savile, and one of the characters is obsessed with a fictional school shooting modelled on two real cases. Numerous other infamous true crime cases are referred to under their actual names as well. It was only after I finished it that I discovered the actual murder with which the A-plot is concerned was itself modelled on a real case which took place in Indiana in the nineties.
On to The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It's rather a slow read, but Rosen has a great eye for detail and his prose is stylish enough that it's not a chore to get through. Rosen was childhood friends with Michael Lauder, a mathematical genius who sadly suffered from schizophrenia, but who was able to flourish in academia with the aid of various accommodations. For a long time he looked like a prime example of how a mentally ill person could triumph over his disabilities, to the point that Brad Pitt and Ron Howard were looking to make an inspirational biopic about him (a project which eventually became A Beautiful Mind), right up until Laudorstabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoia. At the point I'm at in the book now, Rosen is just describing his childhood and adolesence and how he came to know Laudor.
Well, I mean an abusive childhood background is pretty textbook for any kind of serial killer or spree killer. Getting three for three might be a bit rote but it’s not unrealistic. I’ve never read the book though.
I made the argument at greater length in my latest Substack post. I find it interesting that Clark only feels the need to explain villainous behaviour as the product of childhood trauma when the perpetrator is female. The male perpetrators in her books never get any such pat explanations.
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