Women on the Scottish coast at the whims of male violence

“If I were a woman I would give men a wide berth.”

A decent man says this in Evie Wyld’s wondrous and disturbing third novel, “The Bass Rock” — and with good reason. So many other men in the book are far less decent, and all too capable of closing even wide berths.

In one of the novel’s first scenes, a woman named Viviane is suddenly, aggressively approached in the parking lot of a grocery store by another woman, a stranger who’s treating her as an old friend. It’s late at night, and Viviane is made nervous by the woman’s energy. “Sorry, I’m not sure I know you,” Viviane tells her. “Yes,” the woman responds, keeping step beside her, “but pretend that you do, there’s a man hiding behind your car.”

In this small moment you find several of this book’s larger themes: a sense of impending violence; the base, shadowy havoc that is masculinity; the complications and saving graces of female companionship; cleverness in storytelling.

“The Bass Rock” is that potentially dreadful thing, a timely novel, though its subject — the violence men inflict against women — is evergreen. And the perennial nature of that terror is very intentionally reflected in the book’s structure, which shuffles between three historical periods. Viviane, the woman in the parking lot, lives more or less in the current day. She’s nearing 40 but adrift in all the ways someone might be in their early 20s. She’s staying alone at her recently deceased grandmother’s house while it’s on the market to be sold, in North Berwick, a village on the eastern shore of Scotland. Just a couple of miles off the coast sits the stunning, steep island of volcanic rock from which the novel takes its title.

A few steps back in time is Ruth, Viviane’s grandmother, living in the house just after World War II. She’s married to a widower, Peter, who has two sons, and she’s having trouble adjusting to both her family dynamic and the boorish locals. In one set piece that moves from comic to deeply unnerving, she’s strong-armed into hosting the town’s annual winter picnic, which is mostly an excuse for the men to get some forceful groping in during an adults-only game of hide-and-seek.

The third narrative is told by Joseph, a boy living in the same area centuries ago whose father rescues a young girl named Sarah from being burned as a witch. While they’re on the run from the angry mob of villagers, Joseph sentimentally imagines a future for himself and Sarah. It doesn’t end well.

The book’s spirit feels most anchored in Ruth’s section, though Viviane’s is vital and provides most of the book’s oxygenating levity. Maggie, the stranger in the parking lot, becomes an unlikely friend to Viviane, even staying with her in the house for stretches of time. An occasional sex worker, Maggie dispenses withering opinions about men. “I trust a man who golfs less than a man who pays for sex,” she says.

A fourth element underscores the book’s theme: a series of vignettes inserted throughout, unspecified in time and place, most of them less than two pages. These are études about anonymous women over the years who were chased, locked up, left for dead.

All of this makes the book sound awfully grim, but the experience of reading it isn’t. The message it leaves you with — down to its expertly chilling final line — is certainly dark. But in delivering it, Wyld consistently entertains, juggling the pleasures of several different genres. There’s something alchemical in the way that, with hardly a clumsy step, she draws on elements of eerie natural horror (“like a memory of something dreadful in childhood, something from the woods”) and the supernatural (“Ruth awoke at around 3 in the morning, with the sensation that someone had sat on the edge of the bed and then crawled over her”) alongside any number of other motifs: postwar life; boarding schools; domestic drama; sibling drama; modern, quippy friendship.

There are literal ghosts in this book — the spirits of wronged girls and women. And if, toward the end, I felt that the novel’s spectral elements simmered on a heat that could be lowered by 20% or so, that’s simply personal taste. Wyld essentially pulls it off, the way she pulls off nearly everything.

For the week ended Sept. 19, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.

— Publishers Weekly