Rebecca Watson possesses an uncanny ability to manipulate a reader’s gaze. The most immediately striking thing about both her debut novel, little scratch, and its successor, I Will Crash, is the corporeality of her language, the page becoming a stage. Indents and unconventional paragraph spacing force the eye to flick back and forth across the text. The effect is at once immersive and evocative. I Will Crash establishes its strengths in a few short pages, in an eerie and tense conversation between the narrator and her brother, who asks for her best friend’s phone number:

No, I repeated, it’s her number to give.

And she’s two years below you,

I paused over the ending, then delivered

      you creep

This approach, though seemingly free, is highly controlled. Its success depends on whether Watson is skilled enough to sustain it over more than a couple of pages. It turns out she is. 

Like little scratch, the presiding emotion of I Will Crash is pain, which scatters words and thoughts and time. While the unnamed protagonist of the former was seeking to comprehend her sexual assault, the narrator of the latter, Rosa, is mourning the sudden death of her estranged brother, revealed in the opening pages. ‘A death is a death is a death,’ she thinks, but of course it isn’t. Her brother may be physically gone, but he has haunted Rosa for years. His death ‘is not something only to feel, but to tell’. It pushes her to relive her entire life over again. This is a device that lets Watson depart from the claustrophobic interiority of little scratch. Here we have a more complex family history to excavate. As the week wears on – the novel is separated into days – Rosa remembers the troubled relationship she had with her brother, who was a dangerous, angry person. She pores over her fraught adolescence, friendships and time at school. Memories and people bleed into each other. Sometimes she will talk to her boyfriend and an old school friend will reply. It’s as though she is living two existences, one layered on top of the other, their edges misaligned.

‘Time only goes in one direction,’ Rosa says bitterly to her father, but Watson knows it’s more of a two-way street. The games with chronology are another strength of I Will Crash. Watson’s approach to language allows her to be extraordinarily playful – to consider not only the ways in