Francine Toon didn’t arrive in Scottish fiction to hand out mist and menace like free samples. Her darkness isn’t a costume. It’s a method. She takes landscapes people are trained to romanticise—the Highlands, the coast, the “picturesque” small town—and uses them as instruments: pressure, memory, surveillance. The ground in her work doesn’t cradle characters. It watches them. It hems them in. It keeps the receipts.
You can feel the poet behind it. Toon wrote poetry as Francine Elena before the novels, and that background shows in the way she handles mood: not as decorative gloom, but as a controlled build of dread, repetition, obsession, the slow tightening of what the reader thinks they know. Add to that her years in publishing—where stories get packaged, sharpened, softened, sold—and you get a novelist who understands exactly how easy it is for “atmosphere” to become a lazy substitute for substance. She doesn’t let herself get away with it. More importantly, she doesn’t let the reader.
Pine is where the whole approach announces itself: a remote Highland village, pine forest, winter, grief, the kind of place that feels like the end of the road because the rest of the country has already decided it’s peripheral. Toon weaponises that assumption. The landscape isn’t a neutral setting for a spooky story; it’s part of the social economy—claustrophobia, scarcity, the way everyone knows your business, the way rumours can be safer than truth, the way “community” becomes a polite word for control. The gothic elements don’t arrive to entertain you with a shiver. They arrive to expose how fear works when people are trapped together and trained to keep quiet.
What’s sharpest in Pine is how it refuses the genre’s favourite comfort: the clear division between “natural” and “supernatural,” as if the real horror can’t possibly be human. Toon doesn’t offer that safety. The forest and the dark aren’t there to distract from social harm; they’re there to show you how social harm gets dressed up as fate. In a small place, cruelty doesn’t need a monster. It just needs permission.
Toon’s landscapes don’t function as scenery; they function as alibis people hide behind until the alibi starts talking back.
Then comes Bluff, and the shift matters. Instead of returning to the Highland woods, Toon moves to a coastal Scottish town—fictional St Rule, with all the old stone, institutional gravitas, and salt-air secrecy you could ever want. On the surface, it looks like a change of palette: forest hush to seaside exposure. But it’s the same obsession, tightened. Bluff takes the idea of place-led storytelling and shows how “open” landscapes can still be traps. Coastlines don’t liberate you; they mark the edge. The sea is another border, another witness, another reminder that escape is a fantasy sold to people who can afford it.
The gothic in Bluff is less raw haunt and more cultural rot: tradition, status, adolescent myth-making, the carefully kept town story versus the lives it chews. Toon leans into dual timelines and missing-history pull not because it’s a thriller tick-box, but because memory is one of her real subjects. Who gets remembered. Who gets rewritten. Who disappears without the place ever admitting it. This is where her work evolves: she’s not only writing the menace of landscape, she’s writing the menace of narrative—how a town tells a story about itself until the story becomes the law.
And this is exactly where Scottish fiction so often gets mishandled by readers and marketers. They want “folk horror vibes.” They want witchy aesthetics. They want the nation as a haunted theme park where you can buy dread in neat portions, feel deliciously spooked, then close the book and go back to comfort. Toon’s work is a problem for that reader, because the dread is never just dread. It’s about social power: patriarchy that’s not dramatic, just daily; claustrophobia that isn’t romantic, just structural; the way girls and women get turned into stories other people own; the way institutions—families, schools, towns, old boys’ networks—act like they’re natural features of the landscape.
Her gothic isn’t there to make Scotland look mysterious; it’s there to show how mystery gets used to keep people obedient.
So the “evolution” isn’t Toon getting softer, or more mainstream, or more plot-driven. It’s her getting bolder about what the landscape is doing. In Pine, the forest holds the dread like a lungful of cold air. In Bluff, the coast and the town’s self-mythology turn that dread outward, into performance, into public story, into a culture that learns to protect itself by swallowing the truth. Either way, the wild isn’t a sanctuary. It’s a witness. And the real darkness isn’t supernatural at all—it’s the human talent for turning place into an excuse and calling that heritage.
If you’re reading Toon for a “beautifully atmospheric Scottish chiller,” you’re missing the point on purpose. The atmosphere is a hook. The point is what it drags up. Keep your eyes on the ground. It’s never just ground.
