Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

We are a collection of stories that reside in time, occasionally finding our paths careering into the orbits and narrative of others to whom we may not have interacted with before, until a day of reckoning comes out of the blue. It is a crash, an accident waiting to happen, and the outcome can send shockwaves through every sphere of influence and relationship that we all once held dear.

It is the silence after the event, the Hush to which we feel our covers removed and which can bring a realisation of change to our lives, and one so elegantly placed before the readers by the observation of Liverpool writer Chris Williams in his persona of Kit Derrick.

Unlike many of his peers and compatriots in the ever-fruitful Liverpool writing scene, Kit Derrick offers a drama drenched in a reality of human experience; he positions the reader not in a genre to withhold, but to blend in, to be the eyewitness to a turn of one event that can devastate a life beyond reason. There is no outrageous horror, there is no turning of the dread, for what occurs as the reader delves deeper into the lives of those who will intersect for a brief moment is one of a truth that we deny ourselves, existence.

In the rush to be an adult, to be taken perhaps seriously, we gloss over the times when we once may have trodden a different path, and so as we decry many who find solace against the pain as they gravitate in the orbit of those they deem cool, more fun, who might in turn recognise a lost soul on the highway of life, so we must acknowledge that we have also been in that position of damaged souls congregating.

Kit Derrick’s appeal is in his ability to make what other see as the ordinary, come alive. There is no trick, no moment where the reader is suddenly shown a behaviour which would throw the entire book out in to the wild; this is the ordinary made haunting, no horror except for that in which we see the most basic moves as that in which we understand we managed to escape from ourselves, and as Hush proceeds, so the sorrow, the sadness, the gravity of the situation to which the characters dwell, becomes beautiful and poignant.

Written with a care that wonderfully defies a label, Kit Derrick returns to the fore with a pleasure for the reader that will have them enamoured and treasuring the empathy written in abundance.

Ian D. Hall