ThrillersReviewThe empty house, the dark forest … an atmospheric ghost story set in the Scottish Highlands feels spookily familiar

In the dead of winter, along comes a literary gothic thriller to chill the marrow. Francine Toon, a poet and editor, has drawn on memories of growing up in the Scottish Highlands to create a twilit ghost story that inhabits the woods and fells like a secretive wild animal.

At the heart of the story is Lauren, aged 10 and a half, living with her father, Niall, in a tiny village near the Moray Firth. Her mother disappeared shortly after she was born, leaving Niall with a painful weight of betrayal that can only be eased with whisky. Lauren keeps catching sight of a gaunt, bruised woman wearing just a white dressing gown against the cold. Others see her too, but forget her the instant she’s gone, leaving Lauren isolated and scared. Toon builds on this setup slowly for about two thirds of the novel, then accelerates into thriller territory. It’s an abrupt shift of gear, but the work she has put into developing the characters ensures that we never lose interest.

The language is clean and spare, refreshingly rooted in the everyday: Lauren’s little world may have a ghost in it but it also has Monster Munch, the Beano, lemon Fanta. What lets the narrative down is its reliance on the conventional tropes of the ghost-story genre. The sound of dripping, the rank smell, the empty house, the dark forest, the mysterious phone call, the “woman in white” … it’s the stuff of a thousand campfires and Hollywood films. Why rely on these tired old warhorses when, with such an atmospheric setting and strong characters, there’s so much else here to draw on? The book is at its best when it focuses on those objects that, though not creepy in themselves, hold a talismanic power for their owners: Lauren’s mother’s decade-old lipstick, which Lauren puts on in secret, or the pocketknife hinged into an antler that Niall has kept hidden away.

Perhaps our ideas of what is “scary” have ossified over the years, leaving even imaginative novelists such as Toon feeling they must cleave to convention. There are plenty of readers who love the grand old archetypes of spookiness, and there’s certainly room on the bookshelves for well-written tales like this one. But I hope that Toon, in her next novel, lets her intriguing characters stride out into less familiar territory.

Pine is published by Doubleday (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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