Hex

Amazing read. Author is so descriptive and sets you up in the proper head space for the story. Each part builds, doesn’t quite make sense at first and then a few paragraphs more and things click. Click with a spine chill. I had nightmares about “her”.

Overall, I did like Hex. It caught and kept my attention from the first page and I was eager to keep reading to find out what was going to happen. Right when I got done reading it, I wanted to hop on here and review it, giving it 5 stars, but didn't because I felt that it fell short. The realistic ending I didn’t really have a problem with. I've read books (Stephen King comes to mind) where the end isn't necessarily wrapped up nicely and everyone comes out happy.(SPOILERS)The whole point the author was trying to make in Hex was that when mass paranoia/confusion take hold, humans are capable of truly frightening things; which is true. What bothers me is that the author TELLS us that the witch, Katherine, wasn’t the true monster after all; it was the people of Black Spring who were the problem. Even though everyone in Black Spring had very understandable and reasonable fears of her.Katherine is the constant threat in the book, and even the reader becomes wary of her because she is so unpredictable in what she does. She is extremely powerful, has done truly awful things and is just SO bad that everyone in town KNOWS to stay away from her and how to avoid dying by her hands. Katherine is the reason no one can leave and why the river/creek runs red with blood; why the townspeople have thoughts of suicide when gone for too long or after hearing her whisper. The townspeople literally don’t know what Katherine will do next; will she kill them? Finally take her revenge and torture them? And when Katherine finally has a chance to actually use her powers against them? She doesn’t. The reader is told that she is just as shocked at what the people of Black Spring had done as Steve is. That the people who were being driven by paranoia and fear are truly the ones to blame. Even though Katherine has laid this inescapable curse on the town causing them to act like this. It didn’t set well with me, because the author hyped up the witch and SHOWED her doing horrible things and then tells us that it’s not her fault; it’s the people of Black Spring. It’s as if the author is TELLING us how to feel (contradictory to the evidence provided throughout the book) and not letting us come to our own conclusions.But the ending wasn’t the only problem I had with Hex. There were the constant comparisons of things to nipples and breasts (sometimes the mutilation of them, which I'll have a hard time forgetting); and I don't normally mind it, but it was constantly brought up throughout the book when it could've just been left out - aka comparing Katherine to being the nipple on the 'breast' cocoon of children towards the end. The overall imagery presented in the book was really strange at times.And the women didn't feel as fleshed out as the men did, they were just kind of there. And I honestly don't believe the author was being misogynous, but one instance that was really weird was when the citizens would have suicidal thoughts and specifically the women had visions of being raped by some wild creature and giving birth to the spawn; whereas the men only wanted to kill themselves.Steve also has this weird thing about loving his first son over his second; and even going as far as letting his wife and second son be burned alive in a church because, he reasons, it was out of love. But I have a hard time buying that the author tries to tell us that love can take away someone’s empathy and reasoning (aka becoming insane) and letting your family to die while you're the only one that makes it out alive.I felt like there were a lot of unresolved issues that I wanted explained, but I did enjoy reading it. And keeping in part with the realism, the reader doesn’t get to find out all the loose ends; which is fine. It was just weird parts of it that kind of took me out of the setting/mindset momentarily.

This book has a very interesting premise: In the town of Black Spring, located in the idyllic Hudson Valley in the U.S, a witch lives among the populace…a witch who’s supposed to have been sentenced to death three hundred years ago! Her spirit still menaces the townspeople, and indeed prevents them from leaving by killing them if they stay too long outside the town boundaries (people either die of heart attacks, strokes, or become determined to kill themselves), but…other than that, she’s surprisingly tolerable. An exorcism ritual not long after her spirit started showing up sewed her eyes and mouth shut, which seemed to seal off the majority of her terrifying powers. By the time the novel takes place, the only thing the ghost can do is wander around town, generally being creepy, but otherwise harmless (unless, again, you live in the town and try to leave). The town leaders, particularly the religious fanatic Colton Mathers, still don’t want to risk provoking this supernatural entity (and surely not unsewing her eyes and mouth, which would lead to the utter destruction of the town), so they try to keep her existence hidden from the outside world as much as possible, discourage “Outsiders” from settling in Black Spring, and keep residents from provoking the witch through an intrusive system of hidden cameras and Internet surveillance. But some town citizens, particularly young Tyler Grant, begin to chafe under these restrictions and invasions of privacy and try to reveal the existence of the Black Spring Witch to the rest of the world…which sparks off a firestorm of supernatural horror in which the 21st-century American townies resort to torture, lynchings, and other forms of medieval barbarity in a futile effort to stave off her wrath!I found the opening passages and general setting of the story to be its strongest aspects. It seemed to me to incorporate aspects of “magical realism”–that is to say, supernatural events being incorporated into people’s lives as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. The townspeople have, over the centuries, learned to live with this creepy undead witch just wandering around town, and we first see her in the opening pages of the novel interacting with the townspeople, who treat her as just another everyday nuisance to be dealt with. I haven’t seen many horror novels that do this, and I really liked it.The other thing I really liked was the climax. I won’t spoil anything for any readers, but suffice it to say that it’s *really* bloody, frenetic, and just plain crazy. So much happens, but the author still manages to make everything clear and very scary. An excellent, horrifying finale!Aside from those, however, there were a lot of things I disliked. First, I found the young protagonist, Tyler, to be annoying and contrived. A lot of his dialogue (and blog entries) made me think Heuvelt was making a stock “rebellious and naive but goodhearted teenage boy” character without any clear memories of how teenage boys really talked and acted. Tyler just seemed so cutout, like many other characters I’d read of in books of less quality. Second, and this is mildly spoilery, some of the plot points were either quickly dropped or nonsensical. Other reviewers on Amazon have mentioned how a new family comes to town for seemingly the sole purpose of providing an opportunity for exposition about the Witch, and then are never seen again. My own gripe is that they were even allowed to enter in the first place–later on in the book it’s revealed that some government authorities were aware of what was going on in Black Springs, so I see no reason they shouldn’t have passed a quiet exemption to fair housing laws or whatever to ensure that nobody else could ever buy a house in the town and thus be exposed to the curse. Finally, a major theme of the book is how human malice and cruelty can be even deadlier than a witch’s curse, and while I think that’s a good point to make, Heuvelt is kinda preachy about it–he “tells” rather than “shows” on a few occasions, suffice it to say.Still, the strengths of the book outweigh its weaknesses, so I’d still give this 4 out of 5 stars–you can knock it down to 3 if you’re so inclined.

As someone who lives under the delusion that they are a writer there’s one thing I hate above all else. Something that sets me sitting into the small hours contemplating my own inadequacies and wakes me when I finally sleep to unsettled thoughts. This thing is relentless and horrifying, marking each of my shortcomings in Day-Glo highlighters surrounded by mocking images. That thing is - I shudder to say - a novel as entertaining and thoroughly likable as Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HEX. My only salvation might be to find that this hated man might be secretly a person who kicks puppy’s and shouts at tiny babies. But I hold out little hope. HEX harkens back to the books I read when I was a teenager, when horror became a major force in mainstream literature, back when names like Stephen King where only for the initiated. In this far off time there was a spark of originality in horror literature that seems to have taken a back seat. Not that we have not had some fine books in recent years, not that it has been a desert of originality, but the spark that made these early writers so memorable has not fared well. It has not even fared so well for many of the writers we have known and loved since that time.Black Spring is a small mid-western American town, and like many small towns, the world over, it has its legends. Black Spring's is of The Black Rock Witch, a legend born in 1665 when Katherine Van Wyler - pronounced a witch - was punished by the town. Unlike most local legends the residents of Black Spring know there is more to the tale than most, they have evidence of this story. Evidence that walks the town, bound in chains with eyes and mouth stitched closed. Black Spring's truth is there for anyone to see, and so was born HEX, an organisation built around hiding the Black Rock Witch from outsiders, and maintaining an uneasy truce with the terrifying character. HEX holds, by necessity, a high level of social control over the town. All internet is screened and people are hired to check emails and letters for references to the witch. Across the town are hundreds of cameras, and people are encouraged to monitor the witch’s actions as she roams, seemingly without purpose, across the town. But such control is always tenuous, and there are always some who will push against it, those who write secret blogs and gather evidence, and still others who see the witch as something to eliminate, while others try to bid for her favours. The quiet town of Black Spring has its walking legend, a cadaverous horror bound in chains, but there are other horrors that lurk. Some horrors hidden by technology while others are old fashioned superstition, and sooner or later, one of them will bear its fangs and bite.On the surface HEX is about old fears and the ever present horror presented by those human desires we all know all too well, but underneath there is so much more going on. There is much said about the warring concepts of freedom and safety, the very real conflict that is a far more reaching that many might believe. HEX was created as a necessary evil, a barrier against what is believed to be a far greater evil, but what it eliminated was choice, and this begs the question whether the one is worth the other. In some ways HEX echoes a very different book in this respect, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, in its discussion on this topic. It could also be said that HEX is about how far a society can go to evade its rightful justice. Black Spring wrongs the woman, and Black Spring evades its rightful judgement and its tactics become more desperate as time moves on. After all, if you believe you are battling evil, pure evil, then are you not justified in terrible and unmerciful actions to hold that evil at bay? Hex is also about bigotry. Katherine was condemned by such bigotry and as she wandered the town in her horrific state, a state forced upon her by the punishment of the town, a state that was in no way her own doing. Her frightening countenance built a growing revulsion in the town’s residents, strengthening their bigotry against her, making them increasingly certain of their position against her. But what did they know? Did they know the towns tales about the woman were trues? Do they know they are secure in their belief that she had gotten no less than she deserved?Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HEX is not a single book, on its surface it is a book about old evils and an age-old battle against them, it is about our own desires and the mind of the mob. Underneath it is about far more, and is all too easy to place the small town filled with horror and sickness over the world in which we live. I see lessons HEX attempts to teach in modern politics and social issues that stretch the length and breadth of the world in which we live. One thing is true, regardless of which book you encounter. It will scare you, whether the fear is of Katherine or for her, the ideas floating around in HEX will stay with you, and you’ll be thinking of them until the release of the authors next book.

Best horror novel I have read since The Auctioneer which I discovered a couple of years ago. Those nice blurbs from King, John Connolly, FT and The Guardian are all true for once.

Hex is a translation from the Dutch of a novel by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. However (as the author's end note points out) it is slightly more than that. The author, who is fluent in English, not only decided to shift the story's setting from a village in the Netherlands to a rural town in America's Hudson Valley in upstate New York, but also apparently completely re-wrote the ending. I have no idea how the original Dutch version ends, but I would, if I'm being entirely honest, have liked the translation to retain the Netherlands setting at least. There are already a million horror novels set in the US and I would have liked a more Dutch perspective. That said, the setting of the translation is rendered very well, and the history of that area means it does retain some of the 'Dutchness' of the original - there's a touch of Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow about it.Hex also has one of the cleverest and most original premises of any horror novel I've read in a long time. Back in the 1600s, the townspeople of Black Spring tortured and executed a woman they believed to be a witch, forcing her to murder one of her own children and then killing the other themselves. Such was the cruelty of their actions that Katherine van Wyler, the wronged woman, cursed the town for eternity and continues to haunt it, her eyes and mouth stitched closed and her arms pinned to her body with chains. If her eyes are allowed to open, or her voice heard, horrific things will befall the town and its people. Moreover, once people move to Black Spring and become aware of the witch's curse, they can never leave the town for more than a few days without suffering terrible consequences. This in itself is not, in fact, particularly original; there are many legends and folktales like it. What makes Hex different is the way the townspeople deal with their predicament.Black Spring is essentially a town in quarantine, governed by a small council and with its own legislation - the rather sinister 'Emergency Decree' - which forbids the townspeople from speaking of the witch to outsiders. When the witch appears - which she does every day, appearing silently and alarmingly solidly not just in the street but also, incredibly creepily, in people's homes, where she stands wherever and for as long as she chooses - the townsfolk register her location using Black Spring's own app. If the witch appears in public, steps are taken to conceal her from any outsiders who might be present.At the start of the book, this is actually as funny and absurd as it is creepy. The witch herself, blind and silent, is very sinister indeed, and the thought of suddenly finding her standing, alarmingly solid, in one's home for days at a time is frankly terrifying - but the matter-of-fact and slightly farcical manner in which the townspeople deal with this is undeniably funny. Dishcloths are draped over her face. Jokes are cracked. When she appears in public, volunteers hide her behind temporary street furniture or fake construction hoardings, or even just gather around her to conceal her in a crowd.The catalyst for the plot is a series of experiments by a group of teenage boys led by Tyler Grant, determined to find out just how far the witch's curse goes and convinced that there is a way they can 'go public' and be free of Black Spring forever. But their activities bring out the worst in one of their number, and eventually unleashes a terrible evil - but who, in fact, is its source? Is it the witch's curse that drives the townspeople to do terrible things, or does the real horror come from town full of people isolated from the rest of the country for centuries and unfettered by legal and social norms? For all their apps and commutes to out-of-town jobs and modern conveniences, how far have the people of Black Spring really advanced since the days of witch-burnings and public flogging?Hex is an unsettling and at times extremely sad novel, and despite its darkly comic opening chapters, it soon becomes almost wholly dark. The picture of humanity that it builds is a rather bleak one, and the most sympathetic characters might not necessarily turn out to the ones you expect. It also raises some uncomfortable questions about parenthood and family.The horror is mostly very deftly done - you'll almost certainly find yourself feeling nervous that Katherine van Wyler might be standing silently in your bedroom one day, reeking of the grave and whispering through dead, sewn-up lips - although it does escalate to a climax that I found a little overblown at times. My only other complaint is that the dialogue, particularly where Tyler and his friends are concerned, sometimes feels a little forced and grating in its wisecracking jocularity; Thomas Olde Heuvelt and his translator are, I think, better when they tone this down.Overall, though, I found Hex a refreshingly different and fascinating horror novel and would definitely like to read more by the same author.

Le da a un género ya agotado un giro fresco.

I really enjoyed this book. It is as much a comment on popularism as it is a horror book. The characters are well developed and it really is very scary at points. I’m glad I read it