Peter May’s The Lewis Man and Rebecca Wait’s Our Fathers: A Scottish Gothic Reading of Island-Set Crime Fiction
Peter May’s The Lewis Man and Rebecca Wait’s Our Fathers: A Scottish Gothic Reading of Island-Set Crime Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the intersection of crime fiction, the Gothic, and the Scottish island setting through Rebecca Wait’s psychological thriller Our Fathers (2020) and Peter May’s detective novel The Lewis Man (2012). The analysis illustrates how the two novels incorporate selected elements typical of the Scottish Gothic: the taxing process of the construction of identity, the notion of the divided self, the impossibility of forgetting the past, and the ways in which history can be written on and read from the body. In Our Fathers, the fictional island of Litta becomes a claustrophobic space that reinforces the protagonist’s haunted inheritance and struggle with paternal legacy. In contrast, The Lewis Man situates its mystery within the sublime landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, where peat bogs and fragmented memory render personal and national histories simultaneously fragile and recoverable. Ultimately, both texts illustrate how Scottish island-set crime fiction mobilizes Gothic aesthetics to interrogate questions of history, identity, and place. The paper suggests that the island setting not only supports but intensifies Gothic concerns, making the island a particularly productive locus for contemporary Scottish Gothic and crime writing alike. (ŠD)

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