Eliza Clark’s killer women are redefining horror. In an age of dainty Mariannes and handsome Connells, Eliza Clark brings unpolished and unlikeable women to the page. She writes on the unrelatable and the despised woman, who doesn’t concern herself with being loved.

Eliza Clark was just 26 years old when her debut novel Boy Parts was published. She garnered a following on TikTok and was featured last year on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for media and marketing. Since then, she has released Penance and, more recently, She’s Always Hungry, both popular amongst her cult following.

Boy Parts follows the story of Irina, a Geordie artist with so much untapped potential and a dry northern wit, which leaves the reader with so many funny quotables such as: ‘she likes that white-bread, absolute f*cking baguette of a lad from Call Me By Your Name’. The writing feels fresh and fearless, tackling provocative themes that most authors avoid through the voice of a politically engaged, chronically online and outspoken young northern woman.  

The protagonist, Irina, will get under your skin. She ponders ‘When I do things, do they stay? Do they happen and do they last?’ It’s this bleak and untethered reality that Irina lives in that sucks you in. Her outlook is pessimistic, suspicious and at times disturbing. The book has been compared with American Psycho, as it questions preconceptions of someone who is pretty and artistically brilliant. You are pulled along by an unreliable narrator whose twisted mind leads you down dark avenues, leaving you wondering why you were rooting for her at all.

Irina is always pushing buttons, testing how far she can go. She lives on the precipice of unreality, sometimes slipping into paranoia as her life starts to feel more and more surreal. She wants to be a brilliant artist at any cost. When you find yourself entering her headspace, it’s unsettling. It feels at times as if Irina is manipulating you through the page.

We readers tend to look for a redeeming quality in our female protagonists: the happy ending that can be tied up neatly with a bow and the man that loves her despite her flaws. However, Clark’s women live outside of this narrative, playing on your prejudices and lulling you into a false sense of security, asking: What is a woman? What is she capable of? These questions echo through Clark’s second novel, Penance (2023), a haunting story about the murder of a teenage girl committed by her friends. Again, Clark is changing the role of women in horror, challenging you to see them as capable of being dangerous.

Just last year, Eliza Clark released a new short story collection called She’s Always Hungry. This is a great place to start with her work. It feels experimental and genre-bending, spanning from horror, to fantasy, to sci-fi, to dystopia. Clark loves to bend the rules and doesn’t shy away from dark and challenging motifs. The book was praised as ‘one of the best collections of the year’ by the New York Times and mirrors a wave of feminist apathy in the modern age.

Exploring themes of obsession and the darkest corners of the human mind, she toys with the voyeurism of the digital age. A digital native herself, her text message conversations never feel clunky or forced. Clark manages to mould the horror genre to work with the digital age, and it is seamless. Growing up chronically online herself as a fanfiction writer, she expertly crafts social media conversations that sound authentic and feel familiar to digital natives. She often explores online culture and how it interacts with reality in her work. 

Clark’s career has only just begun and as she matures as an author, it’s likely that her work will continue to probe and provoke. Ultimately, her writing marks a shift in the industry with a new generation of unafraid women authors; her work is exciting and current and dares to go deeper.

You should watch this space because Eliza Clark’s women are complex and don’t fit neatly into any literary archetypes we know. If you enjoyed Bunny by Mona Awad or The Girls by Emma Cline, Eliza Clark’s style will draw you in. You can be comforted by the Sally Rooneys and the Sarah J Maases of the world or you can let yourself be rocked by the unexpectedness of Eliza Clark’s words. You can lose yourself in her dark eroticism, challenging themes and gothic undertones, and let yourself be spooked by her truly killer women.

Words by Abby Neve

Featured image courtesy of Illia Horokhovsky via Unsplash. No changes have been made to this image. Image licence found here.