Fray by Chris Carse Wilson
Chris Carse Wilson's debut is a beguiling and hallucinatory tale of grief amidst the wilderness
A dead mother, a missing father, a searching child, a Highlands wilderness. With such a simple yet powerful set-up, Fray promises both mystery and melancholy. The surprise of Chris Carse Wilson's beguiling debut, however, lies in the sheer weight of hallucinatory malevolence that lurks in its pages.
An unnamed narrator arrives at an isolated cottage, tracing the steps of their father – missing since a grief-ridden confrontation. Inside, thousands of pieces of paper, fragmentary notes on the mother’s presence, strange experiments, and warnings of devilry. The child fears the worst for the father’s sanity; until new notes appear, with more urgent, personal warnings.
Wilson's narrative, too, is made of fragments, interweaving the writings of father and child with a third, unnerving, voice. With this structure, Fray achingly captures the cruel rhythms of depression, and the circularities of grief; all trapped here in an unforgiving wilderness. We are immersed in a world of waterfall 'scars' and 'laughing, scorning wind' where 'stones claw out of the ground'. When even the landscape begins to change and senses shift, the child must decide what they are willing to lose of themselves in their search for the missing. Written in secret 20-minute bursts over several years, this intriguing and unsettling debut pulses with the energy of dangerous patience and fractured time.