Scottish “grit” has become a product. You can feel the market’s fingerprints on it: a bit of deprivation, a bit of swagger, a bit of weather, a few carefully rationed horrors, and the reader gets to feel they’ve visited the hard bits without carrying any of the weight home. That’s cosplay. It turns working lives into atmosphere and calls the result “raw.”
Chris Kohler comes out swinging against that habit, not by shouting about authenticity, but by writing a book where hardship isn’t aesthetic, it’s infrastructure. Phantom Limb plants you in a poor coastal community with a kirk that’s functionally dead and a local economy that’s rotting at the edges, and it refuses to let you pretend those facts are merely “setting.” The novel’s central figure, Gillis, is a failed athlete turned minister, which is exactly the kind of sideways career move that happens when the promises run out and you still need a wage. He isn’t a noble man of faith. He’s a man looking for a shape that will hold him up.
Then Kohler drops the grotesque into the everyday: Gillis unearths a severed hand in the kirk grounds. It moves. It scratches drawings. It starts behaving like a relic in a country that can’t decide whether it still believes in anything. This is where lesser writers would go full gimmick—quirky magical realism, a spooky hook, a wink at the reader. Kohler doesn’t wink. He makes the hand a kind of pressure test. Not “is magic real,” but what desperate people will build around the possibility of meaning when the world has been hollowed out.
The new grit-lit worth reading doesn’t fetishise struggle; it exposes the quiet bargains that make struggle ordinary and then dares you to stop calling that “atmosphere.”
The brilliance is how the book refuses to keep Scotland’s past in a museum. Phantom Limb runs a second narrative thread: Jan, an apprentice painter travelling through Reformation-era Scotland, hauling a Bible toward power. It’s a journey through art and violence, belief and opportunism, and it’s not there for historical colour. It’s there to show how old stories still hang overhead, heavy as weather. Kohler’s point isn’t that Scotland is haunted in the tourist sense; it’s that Scotland is built on stacked eras of coercion and survival, and the present is never as modern as it thinks.
So the miracle-business in the book isn’t cosy. When Gillis starts fantasising about crowds and importance, it isn’t a hero’s awakening. It’s the familiar, ugly itch of status: the need to be seen, the need to matter, the need to turn private failure into public redemption. Kohler writes that hunger without flattering it. He understands the seduction of being “chosen” when you’ve been discarded—by sport, by work, by the future you thought you’d have. And he understands that the people who sell redemption the hardest are often the ones least able to deliver it.
This is what makes Kohler’s work feel like a new strain of Scottish grit-lit rather than the reheated brand version. The grit isn’t there to prove anything. It’s there because the world he’s writing from is full of dead institutions kept upright by habit, communities scrabbling for scraps of dignity, and a culture that’s learned to speak in managerial euphemisms when it should be screaming. You don’t get the comfort of simple villains. You get the slow violence of decline, and the way decline pushes people toward superstition, spectacle, cruelty, or a counterfeit kind of hope.
It matters, too, that Kohler didn’t spring from nowhere fully formed as a “debut novelist” brand. He’s built himself in the short story trenches—serious magazines, serious readers, the kind of work that teaches you precision and refusal. He’s not writing hardship like an outsider collecting experiences. He’s writing it like someone who knows how easily a life can become small, and how much performance gets demanded when you’re trying not to disappear.
Cosplay hardship asks you to admire the bruises; Kohler makes you look at the hand that landed the blow—and the crowd that called it normal.
If you want Scottish fiction that behaves—grit with manners, darkness with a tidy payoff—this will ruin your evening. If you want fiction that treats post-industrial emptiness and spiritual vacancy as the same wound, if you want the miraculous used as a knife rather than a comfort blanket, read Kohler and stop calling it “bleak” like that’s a critique. Bleak is what you call truth when you’d rather not meet it.
