The Hush

The Hush
by John Hart
Recommended Ages: 15+

Ten years ago, Johnny Merrimon was a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold. When law enforcement was stumped by a series of child abductions – including Johnny's twin sister – he and his best friend Jack Cross caught the bad guy, found all the dead bodies and saved his last would-be victim. The true crime book based on their exploit was a best seller.

Now in his twenties, he lives by himself at Hush Arbor: 6,000 acres of wilderness in northern Raven County, North Carolina. His mother and stepfather don't understand why he doesn't mind living surrounded by dangerous animals, a treacherous swamp, huge and ancient trees, a scrubby rock ridge and a spooky, abandoned village that used to be inhabited by slaves freed by Johnny's great-great-grandfather. And let's not forget the hanging tree, where three men died a horrible death that brought ruin to that previous John Merrimon. Today's Johnny has become so attached to this wild piece of land that he pines for it when he's away. But it isn't just one of those noble savage things. It's more like an addiction ... or maybe a case of possession.

Now his buddy Jack has become a lawyer, and Johnny asks him for help fighting an ongoing legal battle with some relatives of those former slaves who claim the land should belong to them. Plus, he recently served four months in jail for shooting up the camp of a billionaire who was trespassing on his land to shoot bears out of season. The billionaire is now bankrolling the Freemantles' appeal against him. The county sheriff has taken a dislike to him – to the tune of suspecting Johnny whenever anything bad or mysterious happens – and historically, a lot of bad and mysterious things have happened at Hush Arbor. Disappearances. Bizarre deaths. People going in whole and coming out broken. And now, that billionaire has turned up dead while hunting at Hush Arbor, and his hunting companion has gone out of his mind.

Of course, the sheriff tries to pin this on Johnny, though city police Det. Clyde Hunt – who happens to be Johnny's stepfather – tries equally hard to protect him. Even when the evidence exonerates Johnny of the billionaire's death, the sheriff continues trying to find evidence against him, leading to even bigger trouble with the law. Adding to the danger are the comings and goings of Freemantles, including one particularly scary old lady and a girl who's been having disturbing dreams. But Johnny's been dreaming, too, and even Jack has noticed that something is off about the Hush. The more he digs into its history, the more disturbing the picture becomes – and the more Jack grows convinced that Johnny has gotten tangled up in something old, dangerous and secret. At the risk of laying the cards face-up, there's something magic about Hush Arbor – but we're not talking about sparkly-fairy-dust magic, good witches or that kind of stuff. We're talking something so terrifying, dark and angry that it starts to look unlikely that Johnny, Jack and the Freemantle girl will all make it out of the Hush alive.

It's been a long time since I've had to work so hard at a synopsis of a book, hitting that sweet spot between saying too much and not saying enough. I'd like to ask you, "How'd I do?" but then, you'd have to read this book to answer me properly. And then, you'll have absorbed the full impact of its exquisite horror, suspense, chills, shocks and sometimes cruel depictions of personal terror and agony. Right now, you might be thinking most of those words are synonyms, but once you read it you'll appreciate how many distinct shadings there are from "slow-building dread with a sense of certain doom" and "creepy crawlies running up and down" to "freaked out heebie-jeebies" and "I'm too squeamish to look, maybe I'll skip over this next bit." They're all in this book somewhere.

This is the sequel to a previous novel titled The Last Child, which won both a Barry and an Edgar award. Other novels by John Hart include The King of Lies, Iron House, Redemption Road, The Unwilling and the Edgar-winning Down River. This review is based on an audiobook read by Jeremy Bobb.