Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.
In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.
Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.
Had it not been for the quality of the writing and the skill of the narration, I might have given up on ‘Pine’. It wasn’t so much a slow-burn horror as a smoulder. It had the kind of pace I associate more with Wilkie Collins than Stephen King.
But the writing was hard to look away from. It was vivid without being melodramatic. The people, broken and loss-ridden though they were, felt real. The sense of place – remote, desolate, intimately familiar to those who lived there and yet far from tame – was strong.
When I relaxed into the spirit of the book, I came to enjoy its ambiguities and the constant uncertainty of what was real and what was imagined, what had happened, what had been hidden, and what remains a threat.
The permeability of the boundary between the mundane and the supernatural was created by a finely balanced tension between the perception of evil committed but not held accountable and love lost, but still longed for and grieved over.
The foundation of the story wasn’t really the mystery/misdeed at its heart but the effect that it has had on the people touched by it.
It has made Nail vulnerable by isolating him from his community and making him a focus for gossip and mistrust. Grief, guilt and loss have driven him to drink, which has made him doubt himself.
Ten-year-old Lauren’s perception of the world has been shaped by her mother’s unexplained departure. Ostracised, bullied, aware of her father’s struggles and desperately missing the mother she barely remembers and who no one will talk about, she tries to take control of her life through the use of spells and tarot cards. I thought having so much of the story told from a young girl’s point of view might shift this towards being a YA story. Instead, concern for the bright, curious, making the best of it and maybe not knowing what she’s missing girl raises my engagement and feeds a nebulous sense of threat.
Even Lauren’s teenage sometime-babysitter has been pulled in to reckless action by the persistent sense of a wrong that needs to be righted.
In the end, I was glad to have read ‘Pine ‘, and I’m looking forward to reading Francine Toon’s next book ‘Bluff’.
I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Pine’. Cathleen McCarron’s narration lifted the story. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.
