This creeped me out and then some! All good but boy am I going to avoid any woods for a while. Francine Toon I applaud your sense of setting and creating such a wickedlygothic and downright chilling literary landscape!

The novel opens and it's Halloween night. Lauren and her father have been out “guising”, and are on their way home when they come across a strange woman dressed in white standing in the middle of the road. She seems confused. Injured? So, they take her home with them, but the next day, she's gone and what's weirder still is that her father can't even remember seeing the woman at all.

Oh and that's just the start. It gets more unsettling, creepy and claustrophobic. The supernatural and spiritual overtones are goose-bump inducing. The story harks back to when Lauren's mother went missing, her father is suspected due to his angry nature and alcohol issues and she is deemed to be a witch.. Turns out her mother was in to tarot reading and crystals...

Francine Toon was raised in the Highlands and it shows for the atmosphere in the novel is gothic, creepy and down right scary. It's not just the forest she describes but the essence of it - the trees and their shadows, the noises, the air, and oh those noises again.

The novel’s title refers both to Christine’s name for her daughter (Oren, the Gaelic word for “pine”) and to the forest which smoothers the village.in its grasp.

The setting is one of a Grimm's fairy tale. There is a sense of witchery, other worldly beings and a deep, increasing sense of unease.

Francine Toon’s eerie and unsettling debut novel Pine is set in a small and remote Highland town, where the nearest supermarket is 23 miles away, and the planned opening of an Aldi has been a topic for discussion for months. It is a community where everybody knows everybody else. So, it’s quite ironic that there’s a mystery at the heart of this story. Just under ten years before the events described in the novel, a young woman named Christine disappeared without a trace. Her partner Niall and their baby Lauren are still struggling to come to terms with this. The villagers gossip about Niall’s possible involvement in this disappearance, their suspicions fuelled by his alcohol problem and evident anger management issues. Lauren, who doesn’t remember her mother, is bullied at school, branded as the daughter of a “witch”. Christine might well have recognised herself as one – before her disappearance, she was into alternative remedies, crystal healing and fortune telling. In secret, Lauren is teaching herself spells and tarot reading from one of her mother’s books - her way of coping with a harsh and dangerous world.

The novel opens on a Halloween night. On their way home in their truck after an evening out “guising”, Lauren and her father come across a strange, white-gowned woman stumbling onto the road. They take her home with them, but the following morning she’s gone, and Lauren notices that Niall seems to have no recollection of the event. Other ghostly and unexplained events take place. Could they be harbingers of an impending tragedy? The disappearance of teenager Ann-Marie unearths memories of a mystery which has never gone away and Lauren – and the whole village – fear the worst.

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.

The reference 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.

The result is a gripping, genre-bending book which provides plenty of thrills, supernatural and otherwise. Indeed, in the excitement of the story it’s easy to miss its subtle, realist aspects – particularly the challenges of living in a small, remote community especially if you are a young teenager raring to see the world. This novel should also be read for this.

I seem to be on a run of unsettling, beautifully written novels at the moment, Pine is incredibly moving, intensely unnerving and genuinely absorbing from first page to last.

The edgy, offbeat prose really digs deep, it is a disjointed, haunting tale that is at turns terrifying and heart wrenching. Lauren sits at the centre of a maelstrom of adult emotion, her connection to her missing mother tennous and spiritual – meanwhile danger lurks in the forest surrounding her while her father falls apart and the community grows stranger and more off kilter by the moment.

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.

The ending when it arrives is pitch perfect and emotionally raw – Francine Toon has managed to write a genre crossing novel with wonderfully gothic undertones, written in a freshly observant way and I loved every minute of it. Even as it gave me strange surreal dreams that I didn’t manage to throw off for hours I was still desperate to pick it up again at every given opportunity.

Brilliant. Different. Highly Recommended.