Hush

Ian C. Nelson is the former Assistant Director of Libraries (Collection
Management & Budget) at the University of Saskatchewan and Dramaturge
for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

“Random acts of violence [...] soothed her.” The physical, sexual,
and psychic violence imposed on the women in this novel is not random:
it is serial and unrelenting. How many incidents are there? It is hard
to determine given the nonlinear narrative. Add to this the whoring and
incest and one has a sinister Alice-in-Wonderland craziness.

Alice is a figure evoked in the text, in tandem with rabbits that are
offered up to slaughter and skinning on virtually every page. Then there
is the evocation of a conjoined twin who is ripped from the womb,
leaving traces of her love and a name in the plural for the central
character: Roses. Leeches, omnipresent rabbit skins, and a subversive
game of cards where the losses pay for a woman’s body in an upstairs
hotel room make up the rest of this story. That the events take place in
De’ath Sound and follow a matriarch “Mother De’ath [who]
reinflicts her wounds, time to time, to keep her throat supple” will
not be lost on the reader.

Anne Stone has published poetry and fiction in numerous literary
journals. She has been featured in the Harbourfront Reading Series and
currently teaches creative writing at Concordia University. She calls
Hush a novel, but the repetitive, often sibilant language and the one-
or two-page chapters act more like the words and stanzas of an extended
prose poem. As a novel expressing a horrific everyday reality for its
characters, it is a misanthropic challenge for the reader, however
evocative its language.