A haunted house. Old floorboards and creaks. Baby cradles and little girls in nightshirts. Gerard Collins’ The Hush Sisters makes its gothic influences known: Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King are all mentioned in the narrative. The novel’s cover—oxblood, charcoal, and dust—tells of dusty staircases, murder, and grief. The on-the-nose title draws you in: Hush, hush, it says, come over here and listen.

Set in St. John’s, Newfoundland, The Hush Sisters follows 37 year-old Sissy Hush, a solitary but not lonely woman who is attached to her family home, Hush Mansion. With both of her parents dead, Sissy struggles to upkeep the old structure, yet can’t seem to disentangle herself from it and the ghosts that, quite literally, hold her to it. 

She loves this house. In the opening chapter, Sissy finds pleasure in her bare feet upon its hardwood floor. It is a late August afternoon, and in such old, drafty mansions, floors are cold. In one of the novel’s most compelling scenes, she crawls through a hidden closet door and into the heart of the mansion. As the damp, dark space wraps around her, the reader senses her strange comfort in this circumstance. Following her into the depths of the mansion, you hold onto your own fear, curious at how different it feels from what Sissy does — and what that means about what’s down in the basement.

Sissy’s routine of work, books, tea, and baths is interrupted by the arrival of her sister Ava. Fresh off her flight from Toronto, Ava is recently fired from her job as an Executive Film Producer and eager to sell the family home. As the two sisters are together for the first time since their mother’s funeral, long-held secrets come out, sometimes as slowly as a trickle of a leaky roof, and sometimes crashing inevitably, frighteningly, as if a wave to shore.

Ava, the older sister, left St. John’s seeking a life where she could stretch, reach, achieve. She wants to be someone, do something. Sissy has never left St. John’s, and for the most part, she is okay with that. As the narrative progresses, each sister’s assurance in her choice (to flee, to stay) crumbles under the other’s scrutiny. Ava unveils in Sissy’s contentment a fragility: a survivor’s comfort in the banal. Sissy lives an isolated, quiet life because, some days, that is all she can do to get through the day. Her contentment isn’t happiness: like the cold, dark spaces she favours, it is a hiding place that keeps her safe but stuck. Sissy, in turn, winds Ava up like a stereo dial, just like the one Ava cranks as she thrashes around the living room after their big fight. Ava is ambitious, driven, confident, yet always seeking—and what she seeks, ambition doesn’t have the nose for.

In The Hush Sisters, ghosts serve as stand-ins for the things that “haunt” the sisters at the old family mansion: the sexual abuse and rape the sisters suffered at the hands of their father, and the silence of their mother, are the horrors of this story. 

In their trauma, Sissy and Ava are each other’s opposite. While Sissy is introverted and introspective, Ava externalizes her feelings, hurling them at people as a way of processing them. 

She has opportunities for reflection throughout the narrative but even then thinks only of things done to her, not of how those things made her feel. Ava’s function as Sissy’s foil robs her of interiority. 

The result of this characterization choice is a narrator that never feels fully empathetic to Ava. 

In scenes where she is alone — without Sissy — the narrator jumps to the other consciousnesses in the room, falling into the trap that so many fantasy narratives do: the perpetrator-centric rape scene. 

Scenes depicting Ava’s sexual assault emphasize what the perpetrator does, what he says, and his arousal. Post-violation, the narrator abandons her. We do not sit with thirteen year old Ava in the bathtub after two men rape her, but we know how they pressed up against her. We do not stay with her after her father leaves the room, but we know how hard he got. By emphasizing the act of rape, and the arousal of the rapists, Collins does a strange, unforgivable thing to the reader: he titillates them. 

In contrast to Ava, whose assault the reader must view over the narrator’s shoulder, Sissy speaks to her experience directly. When Sissy tells Ava that their father raped her too, his arousal is absent. Sissy’s description is dry, allowing for an emphasis on her experience of manipulation: her doubts, worries, and shame. That the withdrawn sister finally speaks signals her growth. Yet Ava is stunted, robbed of interiority in her silence, and of her voice in moments she should speak.

The Hush Sisters delivers on its gothic promises, and the sisters themselves deliver, too, on their secrets. In Sissy, Collins crafts a captivating heroine, and in Ava, her curious foil. At the heart of the novel is a relationship the reader roots for. Unfortunately, the younger sister eclipses the elder, if only in her ability to both speak and feel.