Anise Vance's powerful debut, Hush Harbor, is a thought-provoking and pulse-pounding novel of an alternative present that imagines an attempt to craft a new society in the wake of the U.S.'s racial reckoning. It stands out for its ability to be, in equal parts, a sensitive, insightful thought experiment and a roller-coaster ride of action-thriller set pieces.

When an unarmed Black teenager, Kemba Jefferson, is murdered by two police officers, protests begin across the country. But in Bliss City, N. J., one resistance group, led by the brilliant and charming Prince siblings, Nova and Jeremiah, isn't interested in another series of protests that go nowhere. This time, they want real change. Members of the collective barricade themselves in an abandoned housing project, where they declare war against white supremacy and start to create the foundation for a new society. They name this community after the secret places enslaved people would go to pray: Hush Harbor.

But all is not going smoothly for the movement when young, educated, angry, and idealistic Malik is brought into the fold by his old college mentor to be an assistant to Jeremiah. The police are shooting anyone who tries to enter or exit Hush Harbor, forcing the collective and their goods to come and go through a network of tunnels beneath the city streets. While Malik introduces readers to the burgeoning society of Hush Harbor, Nova's once best friend Quinn embeds readers in the political upheaval that defines the city surrounding the new collective. Bliss City’s first Black mayor in decades--for whom Quinn works--is on the brink of being ousted by groups who are determined to install a militant leader with white supremacist connections, a man eager to destroy the collective by any means possible. When Quinn delivers news of this imminent threat to Nova and Jeremiah, the siblings disagree as to which path forward--one based on preemptive attack versus one based on defense and protection--is the true meaning of resistance.

From page one, the world of Hush Harbor is both nightmarish and eerily familiar. As Malik slips through one checkpoint after another on his way to the Hush Harbor settlement, readers are shuttled into an atmosphere of dueling tension and excitement, paranoia and hope. Vance's attention to atmospheric and emotional detail make the movement seem wonderfully, terrifyingly possible. During one near-death encounter, Malik feels his heart hammering: "The engine's buzz beat against his eardrum... [as he] pressed himself against the earth, sensing the light skim the crown of his head." Even Vance's most adrenaline-charged scenes are attuned to the particularities of a character and their history. In the case of this scene, he uses such moments as opportunities to illuminate character revelations, like Malik's fear and growing suspicion that what his grandfather had always told him has been right all along, and that staying under the radar is their best option. The novel's fast pace keeps the plot rolling as it unravels, layer by layer, the secrets held by each of the four point-of-view characters: Malik, Quinn, Jeremiah, and Nova.

But perhaps an even bigger reason behind the world's uncanny credibility is Vance's eye for logistics. Hush Harbor is more than a thrilling dystopian landscape--it's a fully functioning town, home to men, women, and children of all ages, one with its own daily routines, adapted modes of functioning, and developing culture, like the way Hush Harbor transforms on market days. Malik describes it as a "spectacle" of "logistical complexity": "On market day, tables lined the central courtyard and sweaty shoulders jammed against each other. Items were bartered without currency. A homemade chocolate bar for prayer beads. Two rolls of toilet paper for a half of a jar of shea butter." Rather than appearing as some half-baked scheme or a cliché vision of revolution, Vance's resistance collective realistically grapples with quotidian matters.

This realization of the everyday challenges that face the movement's leaders may not surprise only readers; it seems to surprise Nova, Jeremiah, and others as well. A central emotional conflict for these characters becomes how to navigate their own movement's direction, once it has become a society and not just a group of revolutionaries willing to risk all. Vance excels at making space for these quiet moments of reflection, such as when he depicts Nova and Jeremiah discussing Hush Harbor's central mural or when he describes the "focused... cadence" of a run. These scenes, like the activities they describe, serve as openings that allow for transcendent thoughts and imaginings. What kind of world could this be? And how can a collection of people expect to achieve it? The answer, as in a mind-clearing run, seems to be to keep going, no matter what.

Many of the novel's key showdowns--between Nova and Jeremiah, between Jeremiah and one of the officers who shot Kemba--subvert readers' expectations of what such a confrontation might be in a world like this. They often aren't the physically violent clashes one might imagine (until they are forced to be). Vance's ability to balance action and quietude in this masterful first novel mirrors the thematic balance he strikes between the dueling impulses of violence and peace in such movements. Ultimately, this story demonstrates an awareness of just how important and powerful it can be to sustain peaceful and collaborative efforts in the face of a world bent on perpetual argument and acts of dominance. An emotional, conceptual, page-turning tour-de-force, Hush Harbor disrupts readers' expectations of violence, of revolutions, and of truly revolutionary leaders. --Alice Martin

(photo: Shannon Delaney)

Anise Vance is a writer from the African and Iranian diasporas. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Camden and an MPhil from Queen's University Belfast. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children. Hush Harbor, his debut novel (Hanover Square Press, September 5,2023), takes its title from a community founded by a collective that has declared war on white supremacy. They are headquartered in an abandoned housing project in Bliss City, N.J., named after the secret places enslaved people would go to pray.

How did the idea for Hush Harbor as a collective come into being for you?

I initially thought of the idea for the book in 2012/2013. I was in Northern Ireland studying conflict in Belfast. One of the things that was remarkable there to me was how different paramilitary groups are structured. I've always had a fascination with how the Black Panther Party was structured, the way a lot of--some people would label them "extreme"--revolutionary groups existed. Because part of it is this sense of "we will use arms to defend ourselves," but overshadowing that is a sense of "this is who we are as a people, and this is the kind of community we are trying to create."

It was important for me in this book to marry those two ideas and to have that tension between the violence on one end and, on the other, the trying to create a community which, by necessity, has to be peaceful. So, the logistics of how a group like that emerges becomes a delicate balance to figure out. It took me eight years to land on something that really felt right. That said, I have so many questions: How did this thing happen? It begs for a background novel.

This book is told from four perspectives. Was it always these four?

Oh man, I wish I could show you all the perspectives I had in the beginning. The first iteration of it I wrote as a script. It wasn't very good. The second iteration was a postmodern mess of perspectives, and not postmodern in the good way. I had all four of those perspectives plus Zara plus perspectives from the police officers plus perspectives from the city council plus newspaper articles. It was, like, 15 different perspectives that were so confusing. Then, as I went through the editing process, there was a book called Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. I remember finishing that, looking over at my wife, and saying "I know how to write Hush Harbor." That book was just so clear in terms of the structure.

You know you have to have your central characters as points of view, but then there's also the question of plot. What is most essential to see? And how can you make it so when that thing is seen it has the maximum amount of tension for the reader? So, opening the novel with Malik's journey felt like the most rewarding because he doesn't know anything about this world yet. And with Quinn, we got to understand the stakes outside of literal Hush Harbor even though she's still wedded to the movement. That also makes her role complicated and brings to light all these questions about allyship. This is a novel that was centered on Black voices and Black characters but it's also a novel that speaks to the notion of allyship and what that means, especially with Quinn.

What made Bliss, N.J. where you wanted to set this novel?

One, I just thought it was funny to call a place in New Jersey, Bliss! It's a joke for a lot of folks, including folks who live in New Jersey who are sometimes portrayed as very defensive, but what I've found is they're mostly very amiable and love joking around about Jersey. Rutgers was where so much of my writing development occurred and I wanted to honor that place. Also, in terms of logistics, northeastern cities are really unique in terms of their density. To have a geography that has the kind of density that might allow for this whole thing to exist in this one little spot felt like a northeastern thing. Finally, so much of the novel stretches what we know to be true, as with anything that feels slightly speculative, so it felt good to me to have something in there that I knew I could write well, someplace I knew, someplace that kept it grounded.

Were there other books you turned to for research or inspiration while writing Hush Harbor?

Yes, so many! Home Fire, definitely. Also Burnt Shadows by Shamsie. Those two were touchstones for me because they are stories about big political thoughts, and they are stories that, while they are somewhat invested in violence, ultimately have characters you latch onto. I was hoping to do that in Hush Harbor. It's weird to say this, but another author I always think about is Paul Beatty. Even though his style is totally different, what he's done for me and for a lot of Black authors is just given us so much freedom and license to go out and explore.

And then there's the list of classics that you hope in some way your work is descended from, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Maybe you didn't draw from them correctly, but you try to draw from them! There's also a lot of poets. So much of Hush Harbor felt more like a poetic experience in that I always wrote poetry to explore or grapple with pain and trauma and joy and how those things intermingle. So: Yusef Komunyakaa and Patricia Smith and Patrick Rosal, and Danez Smith. They are all in the novel. These poets' sensibilities resonated with me, and I tried to infuse as much of the novel as I could with them.

What was the biggest challenge of writing this first novel? And what was the process of trying to get it published like?

I think the standout challenge in terms of my writing was my ego. It took me a long time to generate the humility to say, "oh, dude, you need to change so many different things here." You need to have that distance. One thing that helped in that vein is when I had my son. When my wife and I got pregnant, our lives obviously changed dramatically. It was a moment when I had to ask myself if writing was something I really wanted. Because if it was something I really wanted, I needed to get much more serious about it in terms of my routine, my approach to it, my thinking about it as a craft in a way that was more dispassionate. That opening allowed me to grow and change and be open to critique, both critique that is internally driven and that I hear from other folks.

This brings me to the second question. I didn't have an agent before this book. I'd sent out a terrible version of it in 2017-ish but stopped sending that out because it was really bad. But then I started sending it out in earnest about three weeks before George Floyd was murdered. It was really weird timing, and in some ways awful timing. But because of the timing, in again a really awful way, the novel generated some interest that I think it otherwise wouldn't have, if I'm being frank. But I do think my agent, Caroline Eisenmann, would have been interested regardless. I sent out initially to five agents. Some other agents rejected the novel but gave me some really great critique. So I took those notes to heart and decided to rewrite it for Caroline. After I sent it to her, she wrote me this long, beautiful letter saying that she was torn because she saw certain elements she loved and other things that weren't aligned with those elements. It was the best critique I've ever received.

I feel really lucky with how that whole process worked out for me. I know other people have horror stories about the publishing industry. But for me, all the critique I've received has been wonderful.

Any other projects in the pipeline you can tell us about?

I'm working on one right now I'm super excited about! In the same way Hush Harbor is a Black-centered speculative fiction novel that uses elements of political thrillers, this new project is a refugee-centered speculative(ish) novel that uses elements of heist novels. It's a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot while writing it. But I'll refrain from saying anymore! --Alice Martin