Bill Hussey’s 2008 debut novel, Through a Glass, Darkly, was a convincing tale of supernatural terror with a compelling edge of contemporary darkness, brought forth from a mind deeply immersed in the Great British horror tradition, but with an imagination certainly not mired  in its too-easily clichéd trappings – a fine combination indeed. Now it’s that ‘second book time’, (as it is for Hussey’s fellow Bloody Books inmate Joseph D’Lacey; his The Garbage Man, is out in May), and in The Absence Hussey has delivered a shuddering experience of family struggles, Fen myth and disorientating madness that does not disappoint.

On the surface, the Nightingales are a pretty dysfunctional set of individuals attempting to maintain, in very differing ways, their family unit. Their already unhappy lives were ripped apart seven months ago when Janet, the mother of Joe and Bobby Nightingale, was killed in a car crash. The fact that Joe was driving has left the brothers in confrontational turmoil, but perhaps the biggest emotional rift has emerged between the brothers and their father, Richard, who has retreated into a place of alcohol, silence and ‘what-ifs’. Joe and Bobby Nightingale cannot forgive him. The family is given a chance to put aside their differences for a time, when out of the blue, Richard is informed that he has inherited the old Daecher Mill from an unknown relative, Muriel Sutton.

As the Nightingales arrive in the isolated locale, (their home for the summer, as Richard’s intention is to tidy up the place and make it saleable), it’s revealed that Muriel Sutton murdered her younger sister Alice. Over the years since her release from a mental asylum, Sutton has repeatedly led others to their demise, ‘made absent’ at the behest of her twisted little sister. The old Mill creeks and drips with the emotions generated by Alice’s unspeakable acts, and the distinction between real and un-real, or should that be ‘super’ natural, is blurred.

But there’s more to the mystery than Muriel and the spectral Alice; old and older ghosts and memories are rising from the mists of the marshland, manifesting themselves through relationships pushed to breaking point and beyond. A hungry and insane presence lurks in the shadows of the original Mill house, something that wants to return to the land it once dominated, something that already knows the Nightingales far too intimately.

The Absence is another wonderfully atmospheric offering from a writer who knows his horror. Hussey’s especially successful when it comes to giving the Daecher Mill life, and un-death, but there are hints of beauty and hope here too, in his descriptions of the land, the rekindling of Joe’s love for his girlfriend Sam, and the moment when he realises he’s actually enjoying the summer’s restoration work.  Hussey uses his knowledge to ruthlessly devastate the lives of his extensive and diverse cast of characters, pulling the reader along at a fast rate, relenting only when he allows us to sink, temporarily, into the mystical and threatening realms of the sodden land in which he isolates and terrorises the Nightingales.

Hussey knows that what scares people comes much of the time from inside one’s own head, and sometimes from those nearest to you:  a personal horror of secrets unveiled, hitting where it hurts most – the heart. And when the horror of The Absence hits you like it hits the Nightingales, no matter what your state of mind, you won’t be able to make sense of what’s going on until it’s too late.

Bill Hussey richly deserves to sit alongside Ramsey Campbell and Adam Nevill as the UK’s finest spinners of ghost stories, stories spun with the very highest levels of dread quality.

Note: I work with Bill Hussey and Joseph D’Lacey on the Horror Reanimated website.

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