Fray

by Chris Carse Wilson

A MISSING PERSON MYSTERY LIKE NO OTHER I am not gone. Mum is not gone. We are here. We are hidden. A father who is trying to rescue his lost wife. Their child, desperately searching the wild forests and dangerous mountains of the Scottish Highlands, not knowing what’s out there. An abandoned cottage in the remote wilderness, filled with thousands of confusing, terrifying handwritten notes. And a dark, looming voice who threatens to destroy everything… - ‘This hallucinatory debut will grab you’ DAMIAN BARR ‘A dark and atmospheric masterpiece’ VIKKI PATIS
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Perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney , Fray announces an electrifying new voice in literary fiction

Genres: Fiction, Scotland, Mystery

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 27, 2023

Reviews

[Renee Godding · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Breathing in enough to be given life, softening the pain a little, finding some colour in all the grinding grey. Remembering that something else was possible, that it could change. That was all I could hold on to, never daring to consider that it actually would change. That I would."

Whenever a book is this universally panned by critics, it sometimes paradoxically gets me even more intrigued by it. It’s not morbid curiosity that drives me towards these books. The low rating indicates to me that it has at least done something unique and different and isn’t just a “mediocre people-pleaser”. I go into these reads genuinely hoping to find a marmite-read that I find to be a delicious bitter-sweet delight. In reality, the experience is often very much like the one I had with actual marmite: I hate it, and now understand why others do to.

240 pages later, all I can say is: I get it now. I get what the author was going for, and I also get why they didn’t succeed. Fray is an experimentally stylized novel about a daughter wandering the Scottish highlands in search of her missing father, who in turn after suffering a supposed mental break, disappeared whilst “looking for” his deceased wife in the wild. The bleak and inhospitable nature around her creates a stark background for our unnamed protagonists grief and guilt over her double loss; the loss of someone missing without resolve, and the loss of someone certainly gone for good.

Throughout the first 40 pages or so, I was actually loving the atmosphere and the way the characters inner monologue unfolded. It reminded me stylistically of the likes of Infinite Ground and Lanny; a stream of consciousness, hallucinatory mix of nature-writing and psychological musings. which can be hit-or-miss, but happened to work for me (especially in the case of the latter). Then, after that 25% mark, I began to see the cracks emerge, and slowly watched the novel crumble apart. Essentially; this should’ve stayed a short-story. Had the author stopped at that 25% mark, it would’ve been a 4-star story, and nothing much would’ve been lost. After this point, repetition set in. Unstructured, disjointed and draining repetition.
You could argue the symbolism here: it being a reflection of the character’s “working through grief in real time”. I would’ve accepted that as part of the novel, had their been an end-point to this journey. Instead, this book is all wandering and eventually goes nowhere. There’s no pay-off, no ending, no conclusion. In the end, the characters are in the exact place they left from.
Some readers may see their own experience with complex grief and/or trauma reflected here. To me, there just was no point to reliving that experience, without any pay-off or new insight to be gained.

In short: a bleak, disjointed “wandering” of text, that has a single message and “feeling” to convey. Unfortunately, it conveyed that in the first 40 pages or so, and the rest of the story did little but take away from its strength.

[Pauline · Rating 2 out of 5]

A man is looking for his wife, he believes that she is hidden somewhere and will stop at nothing to find her. His daughter is looking for him and finds an abandoned cottage in the woods with lots of notes telling of his search.
A strange novel that was hard to know what was going on.
Thank you to NetGalley and HarperNorth for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Neve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Pretty accurate display of mental illness lol but far too dramatic for the Scottish Highlands

[AtomicBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author knows how to use language to great effect to create a feeling, to create an atmosphere to create a real intensity, The short sharp sentences, next to the long rambling ones create a stream of consciousness so you feel like you’re in the narrators head. Having lost my mum and dad at a relatively young age, I can certainly relate to the feelings in this book, and the feelings grief brings. The Scottish highlands play their part perfectly and help create an equally intense but beautiful backdrop that brings despair and hope in equal measure.

[Luna Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Fray’ is an exceptional and haunting debut, very reminiscent of the work of Max Porter. It follows an unnamed person as they search the Scottish Highlands for their grieving father after the loss of their mother. It’s a spiral into the depths of grief and guilt, featuring a break from reality that culminates in a final sequence that is both surreal and meaningful.

This certainly isn’t a book for everyone due to the experimental nature of the writing, however I absolutely loved it. Chris Carse Wilson is a highly talented writer and ‘Fray’ is filled with passages that resonated deeply with me. I highly recommend taking the time to read it.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 2 out of 5]

An unnamed protagonist suffers a double bereavement when their mother dies and their father goes missing in the Scottish Highlands, distracted with grief at the death of his wife.

Guilt ridden by an argument that may have propelled their father's plight, the protagonist arrives in the Highlands, attempting to piece together what has happened to their father and come to terms with their own grief and guilt.

Experimental and strange, I think this is a marmite book. You will either adore it or it really won't be for you.

[Peter Moji · Rating 1 out of 5]

EMPTY.
Repetitive.
BAD.
Read.
Stopping.
Stopped.
DNF.
SILENCE.

9:20am daylight

[Coral Davies · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really should have dnf'd this after the first 70 pages.

It's an intriguing premise: a genderless narrator searches for their missing father. Their father, who has vanished in the Scottish countryside whilst looking for their wife. A wife who is dead.

This is a book exploring what appears to be a generational mental health crisis. One parent has a breakdown after the death of their partner, and their child subsequently succumbs to their own inner demons of depression whilst trying to uncover the mystery of what happened to their missing father in the mountains. You piece this together through notes left by the missing dad, alongside the observations of the nameless narrator.

In order to portray this mental collapse, the author has the narrator spiral. Their stream of consciousness becomes more erratic, repetitive and hard to follow. They begin to reenact their father's unstable behaviour, making the narrative ceaseless and cyclical.

Unfortunately, this makes for a very mundane and monotonous read. While there are snippets of interest - references to a devil prowling the wilderness are particularly emotive and spine tingling - these are few and far between. I'm not a fan of stream of consciousness in general - there's usually very little dialogue and no real plot.

If you want to read a book about grief and overcoming poor mental health, I would highly recommend Brat by Gabriel Smith instead. That book made me weep more than once, whereas this novel had me skim reading it right to the last page.

[Nic Alden · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF - this started with a lot of potential and I genuinely didn't mind the experimental format, but the level of repetition in each of the segments made this a huge challenge to read- particularly with the main perspective. I ended up heavily skimming the main POV segments from about 65% on, then eventually skipped to the end and read the last chapter. Interesting premise, but ultimately the payoff was not there for me.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably just short of 4*. A tough, somewhat experimental read with lots of raw emotion. It reads a bit like a radio play with three different voices, though for one of the voices I still have no idea who was speaking. I liked the book overall but by the end some questions were still very much unresolved and I was hoping to see them answered.

[Katie Norman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I throughly enjoyed the audiobook!
I loved the journey the author took the readers on, it was completely different to anything I have read before. Unfortunately, the whole book did feel quite repetitive, I did skim through some areas, which did make finishing the book more difficult.

[Simon Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially I tried reading this book in short bursts. It remained as fragmentary and elusive as the letters left by the protagonist’s father. When I sat down and read the final 100 pages in one sitting, I found I connected more with the rhythm and the cadences of the story. This will definitely be a marmite novel, but it is worth sticking with. There are interesting reflections on man’s interaction and alienation from the natural world, alienation from self and others. Through mental and physical struggle comes ultimate redemption.

[Cally · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very bizarre book. I ended up skimming the last 60 pages as it was so repetitive. I was disappointed with it overall and gutted I spent my birthday voucher buying it 🙈

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grief, anxiety, depression. A dark and frightening novel.

[Brooke Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

I really wanted to like this book, however it was grossly miss-sold. Not a thriller and sacrilegious to compare to Max Porter. Whoever did the marketing deserves a raise tbh.

So many aspects of this book could have been great but wholly missed the mark. Nameless / genderless protagonist, grief, the Scottish highlands all could have been so much more but in this case formed 200 odd pages of nothing but pissing about in the woods.

The book lacked plot, dialogue and general substance. The whole thing was a real struggle to slog through, It just felt like a self indulgent ego trip.

I hope it’s for some people out there, it just really wasn’t for me.

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above all, the main sense I get from Chris Carse Wilson’s debut novel is that this is a book he needed to write. You can just feel the urgency of it, how much it must have meant to capture the feelings in these pages.

Fray begins with its anonymous narrator arriving at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. The narrator’s mother died some time ago, and shortly afterwards their father disappeared, apparently unable to accept what had happened. The narrator has now traced their father to this cottage – he’s not there himself, but the place is full of papers and maps written and drawn by his hand. The novel chronicles its narrator’s attempt to piece together these texts and, hopefully, find a clue to their father’s whereabouts.

The papers are haphazard and don’t make a great deal of sense. The narrator’s father talks of searching for his wife, but also mentions the Devil. He records times and weather conditions precisely, then describes experiments whose purpose is unclear. One of his hand-drawn maps has the word ‘hotel’ marked prominently, but there doesn’t seem to be a hotel nearby. Perhaps the father has made some sort of breakthrough, but if so, its nature is inscrutable.

The narrator is driven to their wit’s end trying to puzzle all this out. Along the way, they talk about the darkness that has clouded their life at times, and the ways they’ve tried to cope. Running is one thing that helped, a way to keep moving, to hang on:

Breathing in enough to be given life, softening the pain a little, finding some colour in all the grinding grey. Remembering that something else was possible, that it could change. That was all I could hold on to, never daring to consider that it actually would change. That I would.

Fray can be seen as an active process of working through its narrator’s deep feelings – and there’s cause to wonder how much of what’s narrated is happening in the external world, and how much in the narrator’s mind. Then again, for this narrator, there may not need be much difference. Whatever your interpretation, the experience of Fray’s narrator is vivid in Carse Wilson’s telling.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Promoted by its plot, this will disappoint anyone who embarks on it looking for a mystery.

An unnamed narrator arrives at an isolated cottage in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, tracing the last known movements of his father, not long after the death of his mother.

Carse writes the narrator as being uncomfortable, inexperienced and unknowledgable about the wilds of the Highlands. Its either that, which I prefer to believe, or Carse himself is. To the narrator, the mountains are threatening rather than alluring. He mistakenly states that he is in a place no mountaineers tred, as there are no such places.

His father however, clearly did. On a whim, perhaps due to some sort of breakdown, his father walks out after the death of his wife, and disappears. His son, the narrator, discovers hundreds of loose pages strewn around the cottage, that give an idea of the father's fragile mental health, for example, he believes his wife to be still alive.

Its a really strange novel. Its not what you would expect it to be, which is fine, but its not really about grief either. Usually when a novel is set in remote mountains such as the Highlands the backdrop is a key part of the story. Not so here.

My understanding of it is that it is about a son experiencing guilt followed closely by depression, after losing his parents, because he realises that he never really knew them. In particular his father, who is senses is geographically close by, yet more distant than ever.

I just about stuck with it, and was ultimately disappointed by it, though by its experimental nature I can respect Carse's boldness. His publisher and many of the media reviews do the novel no favours though.

[Charlie Morris (Read, Watch & Drink Coffee) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fray is a difficult book for me to review, because it's usually the kind of book I hate. (Sorry Chris, give me a second to redeem myself here!)

It's a little literary, a little experimental almost. Very repetitive at times. Some would say it has a non-end (but I actually disagree here). And it's just a very surreal experience. Normally, I easily zone out with that kind of book.

But if you can allow yourself to be drawn in by the journey this narrative takes you on, it really hits emotionally.

Maybe if I had read this last year, I would have shrugged it off as nonsensical. But in my current mindset, I felt the punch of every beautifully written word.

While some may read this book as one man's repetitive ramblings, I saw his desperate attempts to literally claw himself out from grief and depression.

There are so many beautiful quotes throughout, which I think really highlight the journey of this character as he tries to resurface from his despair.

It's obvious that the author has put a lot of his personal experiences into his writing, which is why different readers will react so differently to this book, as it's all about how these words translate to your own experiences.

I've only experienced a small sense of grief recently, I suppose grief of an idea more than anything physical, but I just feel like Chris understood that, so I found this book very comforting.

It's a tough one to recommend as you definitely need to pick this book up at the right time. But if these quotes connect with you, then it's definitely worth a read.

[Alec · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this book as the protagonist searched and explored their father's notes, but ultimately I feel that only one of the plot points was ever resolved in the end - that of the protagonists grief for the loss of their Mum and the disappearance of their Dad. If the book had been about the protagonists grief then the end would have been great, but while the theme is touched on, it just doesn't seem to be about that.
It's a shame because I really did love the pacing and writing style and the level of structured confusion and tension the author was able to create. The end was just disappointing.

[Claire Fern · Rating 1 out of 5]

Goodness, where to start.

This story tells the tale of loss, and of an adult (gender never given) whose mother dies and whose dad flees to wild Scotland after the two have a row. The son/daughter try to locate them finding lots of papers with the dads rambling.

In all honestly there is very little story, there is little character descriptions, there is very little anything.

The story is very repetitive and I only completed it with the hope of a twist at the end. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

I feel this is the ramblings of an entitled middle class white male which probably wouldn’t have published if it had been written by anybody else.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I’ve never read anything like it. The story is set in the bleakness of the Scottish highlands, which sets the scene for a beautiful tale of loss, grief, and personal discovery. The writing is like haiku poetry at times, mesmerising and poetic.

It’s an unusual novel which creates a real sense of place and uses the encroaching natural surroundings to accentuate the narrator’s imploding mental health. Loved it, and can’t stop thinking about it now it’s finished. Really haunting and beautiful.

[Liv · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fray follows an unnamed protagonist who ventured to the Scottish Highlands in search for her missing father, driven by the grief of losing him and her mother so close together. It is written as a reflection of a spiralling mind with lots of disjointed descriptions and repetition. It is experimental and strange but sadly a form of storytelling I did not enjoy.

Thank you HarperNorth for my advanced reading copy.

[Mrs Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story had me gripped from page one. As both a runner and someone who loves the wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands this book transported me to a thoroughly engrossing world. Full of mystery and the complicated sensations of grief, it is also an emotional journey with plenty of twists and turns. This tale is beautifully rendered with a distinct style that brings the full range of emotions to the surface.

[David James Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be fair to say that Fray isn't my usual sort of book, but I found it superb.

The writing in this book is something else. Thoughtful, sharp, and deeply considered use of language that is both utterly captivating, and pulls off the trick of being both intense yet surprisingly accessible.

Fray is drenched in atmosphere, and the imagery it produces transports you to the highlands for this evocative tale of grief and loss.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Fray at Brome Lake Books; it seems to be a mystery with an appealing cover, and an Alan Cumming blurb the conjures up Masterpiece Classics. It’s actually a wildly immersive exploration of grief, guilt, and mental illness, mediated by nature, running, and intentionality. It’s all metaphor, pierced by intense resonance. I’m not sure it accomplishes everything sets out to, but I respect the hell out of the effort.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the while I read this, I was left wondering "what, why, who?"
So many questions that needed to be answered.
Yet, it didn't feel frustrating, more it was a spur to read more, now, and quicker.
It's a strange one, but strange I a good way.
A little unsettling not being able to get to grips with the characters easily......
I enjoyed it.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange book, like nothing I’ve ever read before. Haunting, gripping, a visceral portrayal of movement and mountains and the outdoors and the power and chaos of our own minds. I still don’t really know the narrator - male or female? I guess that doesn’t matter. This book is a powerful story of processing grief, set in a mountainous, stormy landscape which is also very much part of the story.

[Rachel]

Fray is experimental, atmospheric, haunting, and full of raw emotion... and I think I'm not the right audience for it; I simply didn't have patience for the extreme (and intentional) repetitiveness of the prose. That being said, I believe some specific resonant moments will stick with me, even if the overall arc of the story didn't quite deliver.

[Aileen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated this - despite the author claiming it was inspired by Max Porters Lanny and George Saunders Lincoln In The Bardo I can see zero resemblance. It was repetitive stream of consciousness but with zero structure. Both Lanny & Lincoln had a plot/ storyline this didn’t, the blurb is totally misleading as well. Give this a miss.

[Zachary Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly DNF, as I did not enjoy the book, although the setting was beautifully atmospheric. I think another reader could rate this book highly, but sadly it was not for me at all.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a proof of this book :)