From the rocky shorelines of Newfoundland, a troubled pair of sisters find themselves searching through old wounds and fresh scars while running the gauntlet of what could be ghosts in their family home. These ideas were enough to make me want to read on, but I was unprepared for the real horrors that awaited these characters, and how much I cared about them, and their story, along the way.
Gerard Collins has played quite a trick with his new novel, The Hush Sisters. By luring the reader into his ghost riddled family mansion, he has left us open and unsuspecting of the pain and heartbreak that we live with these characters, and the histories that intertwine in these dark halls and creaking attics, could be our own.
Sissy is waiting. She is waiting for the arrival of her sister, Ava. The two have not spoken in some time, and the different routes they have taken through life has created tension, jealousy and remorse on both sides of time’s wall. It is a complex relationship that any who have navigated family know all too well. But Ava’s return and eventual over-step into Sissy’s life brings with it other mysteries of which the supernatural is but one. As the sisters begin to reach more deeply into the basement of their pasts, memories come forth to shape their future, if they have one.
Gerard has filled his world with what in another writer’s hands could be stock characters. From an Irish musician love interest, to some wild locals, to a mysterious Uncle Cotton Hush, who shadows both a St. John’s Father Merrin and a hippy Van Helsing, his characters resonate and blossom in front of your eyes, becoming more than just window dressing to move the plot.
There are darker pieces on the board here as well. What is alluded to in the first few chapters, is brought to stark reality later, and Collins deals with the not only horrific but also difficult to write subjects of sexual abuse and their lifelong impacts with a grace and empathy that never descends into melancholy or exploitation for the reader. Acts seen through the sister’s eyes first as children and then as adults through memory, is a testament to how talented and also deeply human a writer he is. The sister’s journey and their separate pain come through in starkly drawn characters and their memories and past shape the present with an architecture born of survival.
And it is the house which plays the character at the core of the novel. Its dark secrets and history create the spell which surrounds all of the characters here. The supernatural and the real, come together with terrifying yet familiar chemistry within the rooms and walls of the house. There is a soft air of Austen here, two sisters struggling with what amounts to a fallen family’s estate, but Poe is never far from the light with the echoes of the dead and the images of lost faces in windows and behind closet doors. There is such a connection to stark reality here, that the spooky bits feel so real, so tangible, the reader can feel the chill rush through a room without warning, and then sense the dread to come.
There is more at work here than just the Gothic, and the reader is rewarded with a story that will surprise and frighten them, but also move them as they walk through this dark, beside the Sisters Hush.
Gerard Collins’ new novel The Hush Sisters is available via Breakwater Books on October 5, 2020 and be pre-ordered online.