108
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
UNEARTHED SECRETS IN THE SWAMPLAND a review by Betina Entzminger John Hart. The Hush: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
BETINA ENTZMINGER is an English Professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. She is a native of South Carolina and earned her PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress (LSU Press, 2002) and Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics: The Origin and Evolution of Stories (Routledge, 2012). Read her essay on Caroline Lee Hentz’s Marcus Warland in NCLR 1999. JOHN HART grew up in North Carolina and attended Davidson College, earning graduate degrees in both accounting and law. He is the author of four other thrillers (three reviewed in NCLR 2009) and is the only author to have won the Edgar Award for two consecutive novels. He is also a recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. His novels have been translated into thirty languages and can be found in over seventy countries.
John Hart’s The Hush had this early-riser turning pages until midnight and envisioning a Hulu original series dramatizing the novel’s actions. A sequel to Hart’s earlier book, The Last Child (2009), this novel is set ten years later in the same fictional location, Raven County, NC, about two hours northeast of Charlotte, based on rural North Carolina, where Hart grew up. The novel also features past main characters, Johnny Merrimon and Jack Cross, now in their early twenties. Jack is fresh out of law school, and Johnny has become a hermit, living in a cabin he built on six thousand acres of land he inherited, including the abandoned former slave settlement, Hush Arbor, for which the novel is named, and the surrounding swampland. Those who haven’t read The Last Child will still enjoy The Hush, as the novel stands on its own, with the exception of some potentially frustrating references to the earlier book that document the town’s memory of Johnny’s past. For example, Hart repeatedly references a newspaper photo of Johnny taken near the end of the events in the first novel: “Feathers and rattles and copperhead skulls hung from leather thongs around his neck. The papers called him the wild Indian, the warrior, the little chief. Some said Johnny was unhinged, a danger. Others thought he was the bravest child ever to come through Raven County” (36). Those who haven’t read The Last Child may wonder about Johnny’s appearance in this photo, but no explanation is given in The Hush.
At twenty-three, Johnny is still an enigma to the town’s inhabitants and is even more entranced by the land’s magical pull than he had been ten years earlier. Understanding the land and its influence, which is addictive and empowering for Johnny but frightening and dangerous to intruders, is one of the novel’s preoccupations. In fact, the land itself functions as a darkly mysterious, complex character whose secrets readers come to know as the novel unfolds. Hart gradually reveals to readers that some supernatural power envelopes the land, capable of shaping intruders’ perception and even inflicting or healing bodily harm. In subsequently uncovering what that power is and how the characters came to be, the author explores important themes that give the novel weight and depth. One such theme invokes tortured relationships, including references to the twin sister Johnny lost in The Last Child, to remind readers that people must endure such loss and that letting go is sometimes the healthiest path. Johnny, his mother, and Jack have painfully endured the loss of loved ones, but the novel reveals that cheating death also leads to suffering. Additionally, The Hush emphasizes the connection between people and place, evoking an environmentalist tone. While Johnny’s bond with the land he inherits becomes spookily and dangerously intimate late in the novel, earlier on he resembles a Native American spiritualist who is at one with his environment, respecting his