Penance

They were playing pretend. And then they were not.

Penance is Eliza Clark's second novel, published in 2023. In 2016, in the small town of Crow-on-Sea in Yorkshire, three girls - Angelica, Violet, and Dolly - murdered a classmate, Joan "Joni" Wilson. Now in the present day, a true crime writer goes to Crow-on-Sea to get the story about what happened.

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Tropes

• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Whether Dolly was sexually abused by her father, as her stepsister thinks, is left ambiguous. Alec takes this story about Dolly's potential abuse very personally, and tells her that he would also go into his daughter's room to look after her when she was struggling with her mental health. Whether this is an Implied Rape situation for Dolly, Frances, or both is left very ambiguous. (Notably, Dolly makes Matty McKnight's parents the exact type of abusive Heather claims Dolly's parents were in her fanfiction, despite the McKnight couple being by all accounts perfectly nice people.)
  • Whose idea was it to torture Joni, Angelica or Dolly? Or both of them? It's known they were the only two present for the entirety of Joni's torture, and it's stated that both girls blamed each other. Carelli suggests it was Dolly, but he's an Unreliable Narrator at best.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Crow has two, which have long been closed:
  • Poseidon's Kingdom, a water park notorious for being built on an old graveyard and its hastily designed thrill rides. It was plagued with rumours of hauntings and paranormal activity until the tragic drowning of a child forced it to shut.
  • Astro Ape, which still attracts urban explorers and has multiple YouTube videos documenting its creepy nature. Dolly, Violet and Angelica try to summon a spirit there late one night; they only encounter a rough sleeper, but Dolly is still convinced they summoned a demon. Violet encouraging this out of fear of losing a friend sends Dolly further down into delusion.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: In contrast to Angelica and Dolly, Violet accepts her guilt for her part (however small) in Joni's death. She's the only one of the three to confess, expresses the most remorse at the trial, and eventually gets released for good behavior under a new identity.
• Bile Fascination: In-universe. Simon Stirling-Stewart's debut novel A King Amongst Elves, and its film adaptation Blood Throne, attract this. Downplayed in that Blood Throne, while considered among the worst films of all time, doesn't have the same cult fanbase that The Room has.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Alec Carelli presents himself as a grieving father looking to understand how three teenage girls could be driven to murdering a classmate, and to tell a nuanced narrative. In reality, he's an arrogant hack looking for a way to wipe the slate clean after being publicly cancelled, and has little objection to getting information through underhanded ways, or misrepresenting his targets. According to Clark, Carelli was meant to be a non-judgemental narrator, until realising that his very worthy style made him come across as insufferable.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: An unsympathetic example with Carelli, a privately-educated left-wing journalist with indirect ties to both Ferrari and the Royal family. While he's more critical of the class system and more-or-less accurate in his assessments, he can't help but betray his privileged upbringing at points, describing himself waiting in a bookie's as "like a clean plate in a sink full of dirty dishes", and believing jokes about looking Italian in a private school are exactly the same as racist jokes in a majority-white town.
• Broken Ace: Lauren is an example of someone who became The Ace after being broken. She was a bright but lazy student predicted Cs in her GCSE exams. After Joni's murder, Lauren throws herself into her studies and achieves A*s, going on to study at a Russell Group university^note , but she suffers from PTSD over her guilt at not doing more to help Angelica, and experiences nightmares and sleep paralysis after looking up what exactly happened to Joni.
• Butch Lesbian: Jayde is ostracized and bullied in Crow-on-Sea because she's stereotypically masculine (and from a poor background). It's suggested that Joni becomes friends with Jayde out of her own curiosity because Jayde made no effort to hide being a lesbian, but it's not known by anyone if Joni was actually a lesbian, if she was just curious, or if she wanted to be friends with Jayde.
• Butt-Monkey: Angelica gets no respect from anyone - she's The Friend Nobody Likes to her clique at school, Dolly and Violet consider her too superficial and dull to truly get what they're talking about, and after her sentence is passed, her father talks about her in the past tense. Even when the crime gathers a fandom on Tumblr, comments mention how Angelica is always ignored in the art and fanfic.
• Bystander Effect: Violet's role in Joni's brutal murder. She's present for the kidnapping and then gets locked out of the beach hut and stands outside all night while Dolly and Angelica horrifically torture and murder Joni, which takes hours. Though she calls the police, she hangs up before it connects.
• Comically Missing the Point: Played for dark comedy:
  • When kids at school ask Angelica if her dad let Vance Diamond molest her, she thinks it's stupid as Stirling-Stewart always told her to leave the room if it was just her and Diamond.
  • Dolly uses the f-slur in her fanfic because it appeared in Matty's diaries all the time, either not realising or deliberately ignoring his homophobia when writing about his romantic killing spree with Brian.
• Commonality Connection: Carelli tries to establish one with Farrah, who was bullied for being Punjabi, by claiming he was picked on for being part-Italian and "swarthy" at private school. Farrah isn't convinced.
• Cool Teacher: Farrah Nawaz-Donnelly, Violet's English teacher, who tried hard to help her in class, and has made it her life's mission to teach in state schools and secure homes. Violet describes her as "a bit 'How do you do, fellow kids?', but nice".
• Cool Old Guy: Terry Tatchell of Terry's Tours, who covers Crow's history for tourists. He's described as dressing like every pre-revival Doctor Who at once, and tries to avoid the darker, heavier aspects.

  Carelli: Didn't a child drown here (at the former water park)?

  Terry: I try to keep things light.

• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Joni's death.

  ‘She’s completely burned, she’s raw, she’s completely raw; I can actually smell her and I’m standing well away from her.’

  • The Witch Hammer, a medieval execution device that is compared to a giant guillotine with a platform big enough to stand on, and a lump of solid metal instead of a blade. It took three grown men to lift it, and would crush anyone unlucky enough to be under it.
  • To a lesser extent, Aleesha's death. She gets her new hair clip stuck in the slide and drowned. Her body then got hit by Violet coming down the slide, severely traumatizing her.
• Daddy's Girl: Dolly is called this by Carelli and Heather, and was so attached that she would scream and throw tantrums when living with her stepfather, even though it was a much nicer house. She believed whatever lies he told her, whether that was silly (horses have small wings they keep hidden) or serious (Dolly's mother hated her), and couldn't be shifted because "my daddy doesn't tell lies". This is implied to be the cause of Dolly's obsession with fantasy and magic.
• Depraved Bisexual:
  • Dolly is bisexual and apparently tortured Joni and set her on fire because she was flirting with Dolly's girlfriend Jayde. While that was the theoretic trigger, there's plenty more to it than that.
  • Possibly, Matty from the Cherry Creek massacre. He is known to have asked out a girl, but is also believed to have raped Brian, his co-conspirator in the shooting.
• Determinator: Despite being hit in the head twice, tortured for an entire night, and burned alive, Joni has just enough strength to get help at a nearby hotel, and lives just long enough to name her attackers before succumbing to her injuries.
• Draco in Leather Pants: In-universe. Matty is a Fetishized Abuser by Dolly and her Tumblr friends, who view him as a misunderstood Byronic Hero. Alec points out that they ignore that he's also a Neo-Nazi who murdered a black kid in the shooting out of pure racism, an incel who shot a girl who rejected him (despite knowing she had a boyfriend), and possibly raped his co-conspirator before his suicide.
• Early Personality Signs: Carelli includes these for all four girls:
  • Joni's first word was "no", and she's shown in home video pushing herself backwards to get her teddy rather than just crawling; she is also the leader of her friends at nursery, telling them what they were playing. Even at a young age, she's stubborn and determined to do things her own way.
  • Simon describes Angelica as singing and dancing before she could talk and walk, and the teenage Angelica is a huge fan of musicals. At nursery, she also develops her temper, pushing Aleesha to the floor over a minor slight.
  • Violet is bright for her age, able to speak full sentences before nursery and developing hyperfixations she has to show everyone; however, she would always cry as a baby, which the doctor suggests is "vague existential dread", and gets her confidence knocked back easily by other children.
  • Dolly would always fight with her mother but grew very attached to her father. Her sister compares Dolly's temper tantrums over living with her stepdad to Regan's freakouts from The Exorcist.
• Everyone Has Standards: Simon Stirling-Stewart, however repellent he may be, apparently draws the line of mocking parents of a deceased child. This comes about after Carelli's narration claims he made snide reference to his daughter's suicide; in response, Stirling-Stewart releases his recording of the interview, which apparently confirms he never did this.
• Expy Coexistence: Joni's savage torture and murder by a group of female friends (apparently over a Love Triangle and culminating in being burned alive) is extremely reminiscent of the murder of Shanda Sharer in the US. However, Jacque Vaught's donation of a dog to Melinda Loveless, one of Shanda's killers, is mentioned in the book itself (though no names are used).
• Extreme Doormat: Violet is so introverted and shy that she will follow anyone friendly with her. When they were younger, Joni would take the lead and boss her around, at one point even clicking her fingers to summon her. With Dolly, Violet encourages her beliefs in the supernatural against her better judgement. This inability to stand up for herself leads to spending hours panicking and repeatedly failing to call the authorities, rendering her an accomplice to Joni's murder.
• Foil:
  • Both Alec Carelli and Simon Stirling-Stewart are writers from wealthy families and have controversial reputations, with Carelli being politically left-wing while Stirling-Stewart is on the far-right. While Stirling-Stewart often complains about being "cancelled", he enjoys regular appearances on the radio and Question Time; Carelli's reputation has cost him work, even when he isn't directly involved.
  • While Dolly would love to believe she and Matty are psychically linked, Carelli notes they have very little in common. Matty had a stable middle-class upbringing, while Dolly had an abusive, chaotic childhood. Furthermore, while Dolly has a Hair-Trigger Temper and is incredibly violent, her Tumblr reveals a more romantic, empathetic side "to the point of delusion", and made bonds with her followers; Matty, by contrast, is a sadistic neo-Nazi desensitised by shock sites.
  • A more subtle parallel is made between Carelli and Dolly, with both writing fiction about teenage killers and filling in the gaps with their own imagination about what might have happened, and creating a more sympathetic version of their subject. In the epilogue, when the interviewer makes this comparison, Carelli promptly cuts the interview short.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Deconstructed. Lauren, a former friend of Angelica's, says (per Carelli's account of the interview, anyway) that Angelica was this—the girls found her mean and childish and would make fun of her behind her back. However, Lauren now feels terrible about how they all treated Angelica, noting that they made fun of her for harmless things like enjoying musicals and could get just as mean, and can't help but blame herself for not stopping everyone from picking on her.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Carelli bluntly tells his readers that he won't share the horrors of Joni's brutal, hours-long torture by Angelica and Dolly, saying only that they can look it up on the Internet if they really want to know. Giving that he already described her getting kidnapped, beaten, and then burned alive, it's left to the imagination exactly what horrors it involved.
• Here We Go Again!: Dolly and Violet inspire their own true crime fandom on Tumblr like the Creekers. Much like Matty and Brian, they are assumed to be romantically linked and made prettier in the photos, gaining the nickname "Chaos Girlfriends".
• Hypocrite: Vance Diamond, who as noted below was revealed to be a pedophile, was also a family friend of the Stirling-Stewarts, and Angelica's very conservative father stridently defended him in the press even as the evidence against him mounted—yet he himself refused to allow his daughters (and any female guests of similar age) to be alone with Diamond.
• Immoral Journalist: Carelli freely admits he has very little scruples when writing. One of his books was built from research illegally acquired from a dead girl's phone (though Carelli wasn't directly involved, the backlash still follows him), he exaggerates events from testimonies, outright misrepresents the people featured, and he tracks down Dolly's half-sister by claiming to be an old customer (which even he admits is creepy behaviour, as he's a few decades older than her). The low point, and what gets him in a lot of trouble, is paying prison staff to get a hold of Angelica and Violet's private therapeutic writing, which he attempts to pass off as correspondence.
• Implied Rape: It's made clear from Violet's mother that she was sexually abused by a swimming teacher, but Violet herself never alludes to it so the exact details are unknown. Dolly's stepsister clearly believes that she was sexually abused by her (Dolly's) biological father, but she vehemently denies it. Her Troubling Unchildlike Behavior - like violent and sexual play with toys she'd outgrown - is very indicative of sexual abuse, though.
• The Last DJ: Terry is genuinely interested in history, but as a tour guide, the real money is in rehashing gory legends, like Jack the Ripper or the Holocaust. Crow has plenty to offer, but with Joni's murder attracting international attention, it's becoming harder and harder for him to avoid jumping on the bandwagon. By the end of the book, he discusses Joni's death on his tours, giving in at last.
• Mama Bear: Deconstructed with Lady Di. She is very protective over her children and cares for them a great deal; her accepting Jayde's sexuality stands out in a traditional conservative town like Crow. However, because of the Spencers' bad reputation, her constantly ringing up the school to complain about their treatment only makes Connor and Jayde more unpopular, and in some cases she overlooks or excuses points when Connor genuinely was picking on other kids.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Violet is timid, bookish, lacks self-confidence, withdraws from others and is almost pathologically submissive. In other words, a Shrinking Violet.
  • Angelica is a pretty petite outgoing blonde-haired girl, while her half-sister is a reclusive dark-haired loner, who Carelli gives the pseudonym "Luciana", or Luci for short, with even her father describing her as "satanic".
  • Alec Z. Carelli is a partial anagram of Eliza Clark.
• Misblamed:
  • Poor Jayde. She's fingered erroneously as "Girl D" for being Dolly's ex and her family's poor reputation in town, is held in custody for 24 hours despite having an alibi, and gets her face in the local paper linking her to the murder. Even years after, she is still associated with Joni's death.
  • Her family, the Spencers, are widely considered dodgy due to past generations' involvement in organised crime, and her brother being disruptive in school.
  • Carelli was never directly involved in the News International phone hacking scandal, but still got fired from his newspaper.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Angelica believes she's the victim of Joni rather than the reverse, considering the taunting Joni gave her in high school much worse than the physical torment she and Aleesha inflicted on Joni when they were younger.
    • It might run in the Stirling-Stewart family, since her father first came to public attention defending Vance Diamond long after he was proved to be a paedophile.
  • One of the Creekers defends Dolly on Tumblr for "killing her ab*ser".
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: A theme in the book is how friends and family of the dead deal with their grief:
  • After Carelli's daughter kills herself, he buys multiple bottles of her perfume and sprays it around the house. He overdoes it and has lost the scent altogether, and gives all his furniture to charity so he can try and reclaim it.
  • Joni's mother Amanda likewise buys her shower gel in bulk, and considers becoming a foster mother. She falls out with a friend over this as she thinks Amanda is trying to replace her daughter.
  • Lauren throws herself into politics and history, particularly those involving genocides: the bombing of Hiroshima, the Nakba, the Eichmann trials and the Rape of Nanking. She says she finds some small comfort in seeing how people coped and recovered with something this bleak.
  • The freak drowning of Aleesha Dowd leads her father to buy up random properties and sites around Crow, renaming them after her. Angelica, Aleesha's best friend, believes she is still hanging around in some way, starting her interest in the supernatural.
  • Dolly has not gotten over her father's suicide, keeping her childhood toys well into adolescence and getting into trouble constantly.
• Named Like My Name: Jayde's mother, Diana Spencer. The locals even call her "Lady Di".
• Never My Fault: Angelica's defining trait. Bullying Joni and Violet in primary school? That was more her friend Aleesha's doing, and it wasn't serious, and you would have done it too if you knew them, and actually Joni was mean to her later so that all balances out. Did she torture Joni? No, that was Dolly lying about it, and she did the worst of it anyway. In the trial and her writing, she's quick to blame Violet for giving them the ideas and Dolly for egging her on, and spends much of it in denial to the judge's annoyance. Possibly averted later as the postscript reveals she got early release for making improvements, but who knows?

  And yeah so (Joni) basically decided to ruin my fucking life in high school. But no one ever ever ever wants to talk about that, do they? Like she’s the victim here.

  • Zigzagged with Violet. While ultimately holding herself responsible, she downplays her interest in the more gruesome side of Trashy True Crime, that the discussion was only metaphorical and she never intended Dolly to take it seriously, and that Angelica wanted Dolly to kill Joni over what happened at school.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: Vance Diamond, a native of Crow-on-Sea who became a very popular and beloved media personality and philanthropist, and who was discovered to be a serial child molester and rapist, is obviously a reference to Jimmy Savile.
• Only Sane Woman: Jayde is the only one of the girls not to believe in the supernatural - she is only there because she's dating Dolly. Her refusal to play along with Dolly's ramblings sees her leave the group and, eventually, leave the relationship.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: In-universe. Joni's brutal murder happened on the night of the June 2016 Brexit referendum, and was not covered as much in the media as a result. Alec floats two reasons for this: possibly because it wasn't related in any way, but also because Angelica was the daughter of a low-rent rightwing pundit.
• Pet the Dog: Carelli takes pains to assure Lauren she's not to blame for Angelica's actions. He also leaves a generous tip for the local tour guide.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Whenever the police appear in the story, they are at best an inconvenience, at worst an obstruction. Many of Carelli's interviewees make reference to how the police will overlook crime if "you were pally with the right people".
  • At their most helpful, when attending to Joni at the hotel, they still ignore the paramedic's orders to not enter the reception (where she's at risk of infection) and question her there rather than wait for the hospital.
  • Violet's mother, a social worker, doesn't have a high opinion of them, and it only got lower when, following Violet reporting sexual assault, they accused her daughter of lying to ruin a young man's career, and let the suspect go long enough for him to commit suicide and leave the case cold.
  • The police believe Jayde to be involved, and in the process of arresting her kill one of her family's rescue dogs. Their insistence she might be involved ended up frustrating the case as they overlooked Dolly.
  • Dolly's father falls into alcoholism and abuse (of his wife and possibly Dolly) after becoming a police officer.
• Popularity Cycle: One of the major themes of the novel is how certain behavior can change from being regarded as "cool" to tragic in teens. Angelica and Aleesha's behavior changed from being regarded as the peak of coolness to pathetic and uncool in secondary school, while Joni became more accepted for her supposed oddities.
• Psycho Lesbian: Discussed. It's common to assume that Joni was set alight because of Dolly's relationship with Jayde, and they are mocked often for being schoolgirl lesbians (but Jayde comes across as a decent person, and Dolly is suggested to be bisexual rather than gay).
• Rape as Drama:
  • Violet was sexually abused by her swimming coach, developing a fear and hatred of men. Even in her therapeutic writing, she never directly addresses it, with Carelli only finding out while interviewing her mother.
  • Implied to have happened to Dolly, as discussed in Ambiguous Situation above.
• Rasputinian Death: Dolly, Violet, and Angelica kidnapped and savagely tortured Joni over an entire night before killing her by setting her on fire. She still lives for around an hour afterwards.
• Ron the Death Eater: In-universe.
  • The Creekers again. As part of their whitewashing of Matty's actions, they write his victims as terrible people who provoked the shooting with their awful behavior (for instance, they portray his Black victim as a violent Jerk Jock who bullied Matty, and the female survivor as a heartless slut, so they don't have to accept their hero is a racist proto-incel).
  • Matty's parents get this treatment from Dolly. In her fanfic, his father sexually abuses him while his mother gets drunk and stands by. Even other Creekers think this is bizarre, as Matty recorded every single minor slight but never mentioned this. Carelli uses this to imply Dolly was instead writing about her own sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
• Snack-Stealing Seagulls: Crow is full of them, with the beach covered in signs warning that they are aggressive and will steal any food unattended. Carelli gets his lunch stolen twice by them. Jayde's great uncle hated them so much he started hunting them with a crossbow. Truth in Television for anyone who lives in, or has visited, a Northern seaside town in England.
• Story Overshadowed by Bigger News: Joan's brutal murder happened on the night of the June 2016 Brexit referendum, and was not covered as much in the media as a result. Alec floats two reasons for this: possibly because it wasn't related in any way, but also because Angelica was the daughter of a low-rent rightwing pundit.
• Stylistic Suck: Dolly's fanfic about Matty, typos and all.

  Brian didn’t know much but he knew one thing. He was obsessed with Matty and every moment that they weren’t together was agony. He thought about Matty every minute that Matty wasn’t there and he burned with desire for the taller boy. Matty was charismatic and handsome and brian was small and pathetic compared to matty. He wanted to do something to impress matty but he didn’t know what. He knew Matty was hardcore and dark and he wanted to be like Matty as well as be with him. He was gay and that was really hard. He thought maybe that Matty was too but he didn’t know. At home one day Brian put on eyeliner that he stole from the store and he did that before school. He looked at himself in the mirror and admired the way the eyeliner made his eyes look bright green. Then he cut his arm and the blood was bright red.

• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Angelica's stereotypical Alpha Bitch behavior, far from cementing her popularity, actually just annoyed and confused people and made them like her less, because being catty, insulting, and obsessed with imaginary hierarchies are unattractive qualities in a friend. For instance, she describes half her friend group as the "B-tier", less pretty and popular hangers-on to the "A-tier", in a way that wouldn't be out of place in a YA novel or teen movie...but everyone else in the group just thought of those girls as their friends and thought the A-tier/B-tier thing was weird.
• Take Our Word for It: What exactly Dolly and Angelica did to Joni in the chalet. Carelli bluntly tells the reader they can look up the details for themselves. Lauren did find out and has recurring nightmares over it.
• Take That!:
  • The podcast transcribed within is a clear Expy of The Last Podcast on the Left, complete with a title riffing on a notorious 1970s movie (here, I Spit on Your Grave).

  This will not be an abridged version for easy consumption on your commute; there will be no silly accents and no interruptions from mattress adverts.

• A Touch of Class, Ethnicity and Religion: What inspires Carelli to write about Joni's murder is that the initial coverage was dominated by Americans, who aren't familiar with the British class system and how it plays a part. Most of the features on the Useful Notes are covered in the book in some form:
  • The Class System: Crow's state comprehensive has more middle-class students since the local private school's fees went up. This includes Angelica, who otherwise would have been privately-educated, leading to more class-based bullying (according to Farrah, who was a student before teaching there). Angelica's family, the Stirling-Stewarts, have aristocratic origins and - along with a "cabal" of other wealthy conservatives - are involved on multiple levels with how Crow is run (local government, parliament, school governance boards etc.). This has allowed them to avoid seeing any serious repercussions for acts of fraud until Angelica's arrest and sentencing, in contrast to the Spencers, who are working-class, live in a "dodgy" area of Crow and are still distrusted due to past generations' involvement in organised crime.
  • Ethnicity and Race Relations: The murder being mostly ignored by the press is attributed to all involved being white British girls, rather than immigrants or Muslims which the press could spin into a story. Crow is a majority white town on the Yorkshire coast, with Farrah and her Punjabi Muslim family sticking out while in school. Farrah and her siblings dealt with it in different ways.
  • The North-South Divide: Crow is one of many Northern seaside towns in economic decline. Even at its peak, it was considered a cheaper alternative to Whitby or Scarborough. The American podcasters give the girls Cockney accents even though they all hail from Yorkshire. The fact that Crow is so remote even compared to other Northern towns is another possible factor why it was largely ignored by the mainstream press. Carelli is the only character in the story who does not hail from the North, which sometimes means he needs local terms explained to him.
• Terrible Trio: Three girls kidnapped and murdered Joni: Violet, Angelica, and Dolly.
• Trashy True Crime: Every which way. The "true crime industrial complex" in general gets a Take That!.
  • All the podcasts featured in the book treat incidents of rape, murder and torture as content to be consumed, rather than crimes that change people's lives forever (of particular scorn are the ad reads for mattresses and Viagra). Even the more "sensitive" podcasts are derided as Glurge where "white women with white wine" intersperse their retellings with cooes of "poor girl" or "poor baby". Carelli convinces his subjects to be interviewed by telling them they can just point to his book if anyone bothers them for the details, but he is just as guilty of mining innocent people's lives for content: "The story was begging to be told and I appeared to have gotten there first."
  • Alec Carelli is a hack writer who exploits the memories of people involved in notorious crimes to "rebrand" himself, including with the Joni Wilson murder. It's revealed that he promised to leave alone the people involved while actually drawing people to Crow-on-Sea, and that large parts of the book are exaggerated or outright fabrications.
  • The American podcast quoted within are depicted as mocking the "lezzy English schoolgirls".
  • Dolly and her online community are obsessive fans of the Cherry Creek massacre.
• Tulpa: Discussed. Violet listens to a podcast about how the Western understanding of a tulpa is more like a Golem or an imaginary friend, and finds the Redditors who take it seriously to be ridiculous. Despite this, she sends the more credulous posts to Dolly rather than the more honest podcast, encouraging her belief in the paranormal.
• Two Dun It: All three girls are involved in Joni's kidnapping. However, Violet is locked outside the beach hut, a fact confirmed by witnesses and phone records. Angelica and Dolly are both locked inside the beach hut, locking Violet out. Both blame each other immediately for the worst violence, and nobody ever learns who was truly the ringleader (if either of them).
• Unholy Ground: Crow-on-Sea is noted by everyone to be an eerie place, having been founded as a Viking settlement - legend goes that all the blood and ash from the founder's conquest seeped into the sand, turning it permanently grey. The Empire Hotel is rumoured to be haunted, although this is likely mythologised by the Stirling-Stewart family; Violet, who runs a Tumblr chronicling folklore, refuses to cover it because she considers the stories fake. The local water park, Poseidon's Kingdom, is literally built on an old graveyard, and while Carelli notes this is fairly common due to the UK being so old and densely-packed, it's enough for the town psychic to protest it for decades. Crow doesn't even have a railway line and is only accessible by bus, making it closer to a Gothic castle than a Yorkshire seaside town.
• Unreliable Narrator: The in-universe introduction and the attached interview afterwards both state that Carelli's relationship with the truth is flexible at best. Many details are extrapolations or bald-faced lies, and he portrays his investigation as a lot more sensitive and a lot less unwelcome than it actually was. The biggest example is the supposed correspondence from Angelica, Violet, and Dolly—they never wrote him letters, he bribed prison employees for access to their psychiatric records.
• Upper-Class Twit: Simon Stirling-Stewart comes from an old-money family with ties to the British Union of Fascists, writes (not very good) fantasy novels, owns large swathes of property around Crow, has tried and repeatedly failed to become MP, and once wrote for the Daily Mail defending his decision to hire two cleaners for his large ugly mansion.
• Writers Suck: Carelli and Stirling-Stewart are published writers and the least sympathetic characters in the book.
• Yes-Man: Violet encourages Dolly's delusions and only makes perfunctory pushbacks. Dolly's girlfriend Jayde is annoyed by this as Violet is smart enough to know better, and it only serves to make her more unstable.

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