The Unwilling by John Hart

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 2, 2021

The best thriller I’ve read in this young year will certainly be among the best of the full year. The Unwilling mixes the strong characterization of fine literature with an absorbing plot and the escalating tension that thriller fans crave.

The story is set during the Vietnam War. It focuses on two brothers. A third brother, Robert, was killed in the war. Robert’s death prompted his twin, Jason, to join the Marines. He became something of a legend but the military made him a scapegoat. Dishonorably discharged and addicted to heroin, Jason soon did a stint in prison, where his fighting skills caught the attention of X, a serial killer on death row who uses wealth and fear to control the warden and everyone who comes within his orbit. X employs killers of his own, including Reeves, who has a taste for young women.

Jason’s younger brother is Gibby. His father is a police detective and his mother, who has lost two sons (having written off Jason), is unbearably protective. Gibby is still coming of age and isn’t sure who he wants to be. When Jason comes back into his life after his release from prison, their parents fear that Gibby wants to become Jason. While Jason repeatedly tells Gibby not to follow in his path, he sends mixed signals, including bringing Gibby along to spend a raucous day with two young women, Tyra and Sara. Tyra teases prisoners on a bus during that trip, rude behavior that eventually brings Jason back to X’s attention.

When one of the women is tortured and murdered, Jason becomes the prime suspect, setting up the rest of the story. After the other woman disappears, some police detectives suspect Gibby’s involvement. Jason’s father is torn between his duty to the police and his love of his sons. Gibby never falters in his refusal to believe that Jason committed the murder. As Gibby and his loyal friend Chance begin a search for evidence to clear Jason, they face danger from the police and from the killer. Gibby’s father is then torn between his love of Jason and his need to protect Gibby from the man he fears Jason has become.

The story seems like it might be far-fetched, but John Hart makes every page seem real. This is a textured story, filled with small moments that evoke a variety of responses. The horror of discovering a woman who has been tortured and hung from chains is seen from the perspective of cops (and we’ve seen that before), but the aftermath is seen from the perspective of a troubled child who first discovered the body — a discovery that will likely shape his life. Those small moments help make the story memorable.

Hart’s ability to create conflict through the interaction of characters while avoiding melodrama is one of his strengths. The growing desperation felt by Gibby’s father, coupled with his growing realization that he’s not been a supportive father to Jason, is emotionally agonizing. Gibby’s internal struggle with his feeling about Jason and Chance’s struggle against life-defining fear are captivating. Hart deftly balances atmosphere and characterization with a plot that builds pace and tension until it races to a conclusion.

John Hart has grown as a writer over the years. Of the Hart novels I’ve read, The Unwilling stands as his best effort.

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The Hush by John Hart

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 27, 2018

The Hush is a sequel to The Last Child, which I haven’t read. As I understand it, The Last Child is a straightforward suspense novel that deals with Johnny Merrimon’s search for his missing twin sister. The Hush returns Johnny as a central character, but the novel blends suspense with horror and the supernatural. It’s kind of a haunted woods story, although the woods are swampy which makes them even more foreboding. The supernatural slant will upset readers who think a sequel should be just like the novel it follows. I admire John Hart for changing up his game (there’s not much point in writing a sequel if you’re just going to rewrite the last book), but readers who can’t abide horror novels will likely be disappointed. In any event, the novel stands alone, and I don’t have the sense that I missed anything in The Hush by not reading The Last Child first.

Johnny lives alone in Hush Arbor, with no electricity or phone or running water, and no desire to leave. He inherited six thousand acres in North Carolina and is fighting to keep it. Sometimes he finds himself in the swamp in the middle of the night and has no recollection of walking there. The swamp was once thought to be haunted by slaves who were hung from its trees, as we learn in a flashback involving a young boy who made the mistake of hunting there in 1931.

Johnny drives to town once a month but prefers his own company. His father is dead. He avoids his mother and her new husband, a police detective named Clyde Hunt who apparently played a significant role in The Last Child. Johnny is trying to forget the past, but he knows he is forgetting how to live a normal life.

Johnny’s best friend, Jack Cross, is a new lawyer, having overcome a difficult childhood. Jack seems to be the only person who notices that Johnny is changing in ways that cannot be explained by isolation alone. His senses are abnormally heightened. His wounds heal with impossible speed. He is acutely aware of everything that happens in the woods and water, whether it involves animals, fish, humans, or trees. As the only person who visits Johnny, Jack senses the presence of something evil in the swamp and worries that it is affecting Johnny.

Johnny needs an appellate lawyer to save his land, but can’t afford one. Jack introduces him to an appellate lawyer in his firm who might represent him pro bono, for reasons that only she understands. Some of those reasons have to do with the arousal she feels when she thinks about Johnny, a sensation that multiplies when she meets him in person.

A grizzly death in the woods leads to a murder accusation, but the murder clearly couldn’t have been committed by one individual — a fact that doesn’t deter the sheriff from accusing Johnny. The murder provides the reader’s first inkling that The Hush is a horror novel. More deaths follow, as do a series of gruesome events with supernatural origins that are closely connected to the Hush, the Merrimon family, and North Carolina’s evil history as a slave state.

All of the secondary characters are created with an abundance of detail, including a rich hunter named Boyd who wants to buy Johnny’s land, a young woman named Cree who dreams (as Johnny does) about bloody events from the past, Cree’s mother who is trying to take Johnny’s land, a fellow named Leon who operates a ramshackle tavern/restaurant at the outskirts of the Hush, and the seemingly crazy old woman who raised Leon and who is the only person capable of understanding the dreams that trouble Johnny and Cree.

I don’t read many horror novels, but I enjoy them when the author creates an environment that is truly creepy. Hart does that in The Hush. As a place, the Hush is such a carefully rendered world that I set aside my skepticism about the supernatural and became absorbed in the story’s convincing detail. But The Hush is also the story of Johnny’s internal struggle — an eternal struggle between good and evil, when good and evil are not easily distinguished — and of his loyal friendship with Jack. Hart’s believable characters and settings, combined with a plot that is chilling and suspenseful, makes The Hush one of the best horror novels I’ve read in recent years.

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Redemption Road by John Hart

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on May 3, 2016

Redemption Road is an intense psychological drama. Characters are living with dark secrets, or trying to find a way to live with them. With strong dialog and cinematic descriptions of settings, John Hart makes it easy to visualize the characters as they move through the chaos of their lives. If they are moving along a road to redemption, it is a twisted road that may not lead to the expected destination. The main characters in Redemption Road are seeking a path to empowerment more than redemption. They want to get some version of their lives back.

Elizabeth Black’s father is a preacher who sees everything as black or white. Elizabeth is a cop who sees a lot of gray. But Elizabeth is being investigated for shooting two unarmed men 18 times in a manner that suggests torture. The shooting occurred as Elizabeth rescued a young woman named Channing who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Elizabeth has been suspended as she waits to learn whether she will be charged with double homicide. Adding another complication to her life, Adrian Wall is getting out of prison.

Adrian, a former cop, served 13 tough years before his release on parole. Elizabeth is haunted by the memory of finding a woman’s body sprawled across the altar of her father’s church and by Adrian’s arrest for that crime.

At age 14, Gideon Strange is 13 years past his mother’s murder, a death that psychologically destroyed Gideon’s father. The time has come, Gideon thinks, to take revenge. That means killing Adrian Wall.

As all of these plot threads weave together, more women die, and the lives of Adrian and Elizabeth become even more chaotic. They are entangled with a strong cast of characters, including Channing and her parents, the warden who agreed to Adrian’s early release, Elizabeth’s partner, and an elderly lawyer named Crybaby Jones.

Redemption Road focuses on character development rather than action, but the plot builds dramatic tension from the first page. The reveal at the end isn’t entirely surprising, although it comes with a surprising twist that ties characters together in an unexpected way. I thought I would be disappointed if the reveal turned out as I suspected it would, but any disappointment I felt was outweighed by the novel’s multiple virtues.

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Iron House by John Hart

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on July 12, 2011

Iron House starts as the story of a man (Michael) who wants to leave the crime family in which he was raised after escaping from a brutal orphanage. Michael's desire to change his criminal life is motivated by his love of a woman (Elena) who doesn't know that he's a mob enforcer. Iron House later tells the story of Michael's attempt to defend the brother (Julian) he hasn't seen in years from the crime family's retaliation. Michael discovers that he must protect Julian from a different kind of harm when dead bodies are discovered on the estate of the senator who adopted Julian. The two stories eventually connect in unexpected ways.

John Hart strives to bring literary quality to his prose. Often he succeeds. Occasionally he reaches for metaphors that don't quite work, or has characters speaking with unnatural eloquence. I nonetheless regard Iron House as an unusually well written thriller. The plot is clever and, although it threatens to go over-the-top toward the end (as is the trend in thrillers), the story managed to stay within the realm of plausibility, if only barely.

While the story is surprisingly good, the characters lack depth. Michael is a garden-variety "killer with a heart." Elena's initial decision to rid herself of this monster is believable, but her later waffling is inconsistent with the limited personality that Hart gave her. The gangsters are stock gangsters and Julian, supposedly a brilliant author of children's books but deeply damaged, is a character we never get to know.

Iron House has other problems. A minor one: All the characters are convinced that if Julian is arrested (and the police are determined to arrest him for the dead bodies that are found on the senator's estate despite the complete absence of evidence against him), he will respond to an interrogation by making an incriminating statement. I can't believe Julian, at thirty-two, is so weak-willed that he can't remember to answer the first question with "I won't talk to you without a lawyer," at which time questioning must cease. And even if Julian is that weak-willed, the army of lawyers working for the senator would hang a sign around his neck invoking Julian's Fifth Amendment privilege. All the hand-wringing about Julian's impending arrest is nonsensical.

A more serious problem: I think John Hart cheated by trying to make the reader like (or at least empathize with) Michael. Hart repeatedly tells us that Michael was raised "to be better than the things he did" but that's dishonest. We are the things we do. Michael is a killer. Sure, we're told that he only killed other criminals, a caveat that Hart apparently added so readers wouldn't reject Michael out of hand, but by killing other criminals Michael was advancing the goals of his adopted crime family. Hart skates around Michael's true nature, does his best to make Michael seem like a decent man, probably because he knows that many readers dislike books if they don't like the characters. I think Iron House would have been just as good -- better, in fact -- if Michael's murderous past had been directly confronted and more openly displayed.

So: good plot, strong writing, weak characters, not entirely honest, and a few other problems but not so many as to destroy my appreciation of the story.

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