The Hush by John Hart

 

This is a weird novel--not Weird, as like a literary or genre descriptor, just weird. It's clearly a kind of Horror novel, with a patch of somewhere in the South that's haunted by a really old and really angry (kinda) ghost, and debts that convey along bloodlines; but it reads like a novel written by an author who isn't super comfortable or experienced with writing Horror, as though Horror is like a sideline or something: Thinking about it, this novel hits a lot of the same notes as The Chill by "Scott Carson," which is another Horror novel by a writer of mostly crime/thriller novels; maybe it's the kind of Horror those kinds of writers reach for, or maybe ancestral debts and hauntings are Horror trappings writers newish to the genre reach for. This is not as good a novel as that one, but it's not bad; the supernatural stuff sits kinda sideways to the more real-world-plausible elements, here, almost as though Hart wasn't fully committed to writing a Horror novel.