Irina Sturges may be a Geordie Patrick Bateman, but the character feels more transgressive than her male American counterpart. Male sexuality and masculinity are difficult to extrapolate from violence in our cultural imagination, so Irina’s beauty and gender make her murder-and-mutilation fantasies far more shocking.

A year or so ago, when I submitted a story to my writers’ group, one member told me categorically that women are not violent. Growing up in Bristol as a working-class girl, my lived experience proved otherwise. Young women can be aggressive, domineering and violent bullies, but we are conditioned to view femininity as something soft and yielding – Irina is neither of these things. Unless she is a completely unreliable narrator (and Clark does a fantastic job of keeping that option open) Irina is a murderer – a vain, obsessive and compulsive killer.

We catch glimpses of the people who remain within Irina’s orbit despite her shortcomings, but Irina simply isn’t interested enough in other people for us to understand their motivations for doing so.

The book is a hard-hitting social commentary just like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, but the protagonist’s gender allows us to see the world through a different lens, ensuring that Boy Parts never feels derivative.

It’s my daughter’s favourite book, and she gifted a copy to me for Christmas. It’s a surprisingly good read. Sickening – yes! 100% - which is why it’s likely to appeal to horror fans as well as young women trying to break the chains of being female in a patriarchal world.