Pine: The spine-chilling Sunday Times bestseller

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This one has been on my TBR for years. Literally years. I have heard nothing but praise for it, but so far have never quite got around to reading it! Go figure! The prize was renamed in memory of William McIlvanney, often described as the Godfather of Tartan Noir, in 2016. The plot is so slooowwww and tbh I don’t feel the eerie and thrilling feeling – like on the blurb said – through the book… we got 2 POVs here: Lauren (10 years old girl) and his father Niall and got zero attachment for both of these characters

Marries the claustrophobia of rural life with fascinating hints of Scottish myths, to create an emotional read with the pace of a thriller Irish Country Magazine Soon the children reach the towering pines and the mossy stone foundations of an old bothy, close to the path, where they have started to build their hut.” For Lauren, the 10-year-old narrator of Francine Toon’s debut Pine, childhood is as dense and impenetrable as the surrounding landscape. Francine Toon was raised in the Highlands, and she ably uses a setting familiar to her to create a dark, uncanny atmosphere. The novel’s title refers both to Christine��s name for her daughter (Oren, the Gaelic word for “pine”) and to the forest which surrounds the village. As in traditional fairy tales, the “trees, coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men” evoke dread but also a sense of something timeless and otherworldly. This idea is also visually conveyed in the brilliant, minimalist cover. Again, a David Mitchell book is an event, and a thing of beauty! But the music industry is not my natural setting and again I was caught between this and another book – Daisy Jones and the Six in this case – and Daisy Jones was read first. This time, because it was nominated on a book club I was part of. Overall, however, this is an outstanding debut and a perfect end-of-year chiller. I’m just a little disappointed that I left it to the end of this year to read it when it was available almost a year ago!It is a slow burner to begin with, folk horror usually tends to be, as it follows a young girl Lauren and her father Niall. It is clouded in mystery, as they have been dealing with the disappearance of Lauren’s mother, Niall’s wife, Christine (she is presumed dead). It gives the reader the claustrophobic feel of this small Scottish village and it immerses you in mysteries that surround it.

The setting is both beautiful and relentlessly claustrophobic, the author paints pictures with words and leaves the reader unbalanced yet fully immersed, it is a peculiar talent that held me in its thrall the entirety of the read. Before joining The Novelry, Francine Toon was a Commissioning Editor at Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton’s literary imprint, part of Hachette UK. She published distinctive, prize-winning fiction and worked on the novels of bestselling, world-renowned authors.

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The references to folklore, the Highland setting and the supernatural elements reminded me of another debut novel which I had greatly enjoyed – Kerry Andrew’s Swansong. However, there are also some clear differences between the approach of the two authors. Whereas Andrew’s story is steeped in folklore, Toon’s is darker, its Wiccan elements pushing it more towards horror. It also owes much to the contemporary thriller, which has turned the “missing person” trope into a veritable sub-genre. Toon grew up in Sutherland and Fife, Scotland, and writes poetry under the name Francine Elena. Her poems have been published in the Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry anthologies and Poetry London. Her debut novel was longlisted for the prestigious Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. It has echoes of contemporary emerging writers like Angela Readman, Lucy Woods and Carmen Marcus. In particular, the latter’s debut, How Saints Die, shares many of the same themes and relational problems. Myth and folklore are integral to both novels, with Pine drawing on Toon’s Scottish heritage, from the ghost stories the children tell each other, to the transportative powers of ceilidh music on the locals: “Songs that bring most men to the brink of tears, before they belt out a chorus to stop themselves.” Smith, Karl (1 December 2013). "Tome On The Range: Two Poems By: Francine Elena". The Quietus . Retrieved 29 September 2022.

Just as the writer and her friends found a sense of control in shaping stories about the things they feared, Lauren finds control in her life by reading the tarot, Toon adds, which is a sort of storytelling itself. “Away from its dark history, the figure of the witch has the association of an empowered woman who isn’t necessarily tied to marriage. Who doesn’t have the same fears as women in terms of being able to look after herself. In this book I was preoccupied by the idea of vulnerable women, women who’ve disappeared or women have been abducted.” Toon’s novel delivers very effective unsettling moments: sudden screams of radio static over Billy and Lauren’s walkie-talkies, a hideous gaunt woman in a dirty dressing gown, a man with a cloak of moss crawling with beetles. This builds into a darkly satisfying sequence towards the end of the novel in which there’s an absolutely tangible fear for Lauren’s safety. However, the way the “mystery” of the missing girl unravels could have been – in my view – a little more succinct, or signposted earlier in the book. It’s perhaps an inevitable feature of a young narrator like Lauren that there’s so much she can’t understand or experience, but my only real concern with the story was that – having built carefully to a terrifying climax – the unravelling took too long and lost some of its momentum. It provides Scottish crime writing with recognition and aims to raise the profile and prestige of the genre as a whole.Splicing small-town domestic drama with grisly mystery and occult thrills, it’s a cleverly crafted debut Metro

This is true modern gothic ... Toon’s plain, poetic language has a hypnotic quality Harper’s Bazaar Francine wrote Pine while working in publishing full time, inspired by her childhood in the Scottish Highlands and its culture of gothic storytelling. She came to novel writing via poetry. Her poems have been published in The Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry 2013 and 2015 anthologies, Poetry London and Ambit among other publications. It's such an immersive, completely captivating experience. I should qualify that it's doubly so for me because it's essentially set in my childhood; I grew up in the North East UK rather than Scotland, but the language and setting were so nostalgic for me. But that's not to write off the author's (amazing) talent; it wasn't nostalgia but some fantastic writing that had me almost able to see these people and the setting as I read. Set in the Highlands of Scotland in a small village surrounded by Pine Forest. Lauren and her father Niall are struggling through life after the disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago. Neighbours whisper and gossip and appear to know more that they let on and when a local teenager goes missing the community come out in force to find answers.

O'Grady, Carrie (23 January 2020). "Pine by Francine Toon review – a chilling gothic thriller". The Guardian . Retrieved 29 September 2022. Pine is beautifully written, and its isolated location – with the wildness of the forest and the claustrophobic feeling of a small community in which everyone is hiding something – is intricately realised. I’m a real fan of folk horror, and this is a novel in the best traditions of the genre, building slowly into its horrors, seeding the weird alongside the mundane. But the real star of the show is the painfully believable father-daughter relationship and its lingering sense of sadness and poverty. They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a sharp shift towards the thriller and the reader starts to wonder and question just how much darkness might be hidden in the souls of some of the characters we have met. And the novel does not lose the gothic, layering over an already tense setting another level of tension and threat.