Hex

The latest in a string of really strong horror novels that I've had the pleasure (horror???) of reading over the last month.

The premise here is CRAZY and super original. The town of Black Spring has been cursed (haunted, occupied, pick a word) for 350 years by the Black Rock Witch. She shows up in their homes, walks the streets, stands silently in the supermarket, and is otherwise a fixture in the daily lives of the town's inhabitants. There are festivals, there are witch tours in the woods, there's even an app the townsfolk use to track her whereabouts by signing in with the time and current sighting. The local teens have made her a subject of taunting and bullying, and there's a town-watch that tries to keep people from moving in and show more becoming part of the curse.

The first part of the book made me laugh cringingly just because of how .... normal it is for everyone to see this terrifying apparition constantly. A mother casually throws a dishcloth over the witch's face while she stands silently in a corner of their living room. The Council members hide her with an Easter Bunny cutout when she stands in the supermarket too long. It's still horrifying but there's a slightly unhinged and comic element early on. Then it just devolves into slow-creeping horror and eventually sheer terror. show less

This is one of those books that you will either really, really like, or really, really dislike. To say it is strange would be the mother of all understatements. The witch is in your face from the start and honestly you have to feel some sympathy for her for all she's been through. She seems harmless enough on the surface....but no one wants to push that envelope. The Black Springs town people have come to accept her like the rest of us accept cable TV...it 's just there. I thought some the towns people were actually much scarier and dangerous. The plot and pacing is really effective once you get past the halfway mark but maybe I'm immune to it...but I didn't see the "horror" aspect. You have to keep turning pages to find out what show more happens next...yes...it's one of those kind of books. I understand the audio version leaves a lot to be desired. show less

What a creepy, disturbing book this is. Wonderful, but it does get under your skin.
Black Spring is a quaint little village near New York; but it has one attraction that is best kept secret. Black Spring has its own medieval witch haunting and terrorising its habitants. The village and its people are under the witch’s curse and no one can leave it for long, as deep suicidal feelings start to arise.
The teenagers are quite fed up with this situation, so they plan to let the whole world know about their witch, so that help can come and they would be finally able to leave the cursed town.
But of course, nothing goes to plan. Instead, a horrific set of events are set in motion and dear Lord it is terrifying.
The ending is so dark and show more disturbing!
A must read for this spooky season. show less

4 1/2 stars.

Black Spring is cursed. No, not some little "haven't won a 4A championship in 30 years since a bunch of kids ran over old man Mallory's goat and he he shook his hand at them and yelled something in Gaelic" type of curse. No this is a 300 year old witch with her eyes and mouth stitched shut who appears out of nowhere to scare the crap out of you cursed. From the corners of her stitched up mouth some words emerge. You can't recognize the language and if you try to listen you will probably shove a knife into your eyes because she likes to make people kill themselves. Also, if you ever see her you can never leave Black Spring again. Ever. That kind of cursed.

This story would be almost expected if this were 16th century England. show more But what do you do with a situation like this in the 21st century? Why you record her with video cameras, conduct endless experiments, use GPS to track her whereabouts, and generally high tech the whole experience, of course--because we are so advanced and scientific now, right? That is what made this story such a trip. The concept is that no matter how much 21st century tech we throw at this most medieval of problems, we ultimately realize that, despite our shiny new equipment, we really haven't changed that much inside. Our minds are still primitive and ancient thoughts, fears, and emotions still squirm around in our little heads no matter how much we think we have evolved.

We just have better toys.

Why not 5 stars? Petty, really. I took away a half star because a main character in this book really pissed me off.... show less

***This book was read for my own enjoyment

Heuvelt’s HEX is a brilliant tale of the dark emotions that rule men’s hearts, and the devastation those emotions can wreak upon society. Black Springs is a town with a secret, a conspiracy so entrenched and so horrific that Outsiders are dissuaded from moving into the quaint mountain town. Black Springs is home to Katherine van Wyler, the Black Rock Witch.

In the late 1600’s, Katherine was accused of witchcraft and executed. Since then, she has ghosted the town of Black Springs, once New Beek, a colonial Dutch settlement. To hear her is to be driven mad, compelled to suicide. Lost to the ashes of time, some brave folk managed to sew her eyes and mouth shut, leaving her to follow her show more timeless path around the lands.

She appears and disappears, sometimes standing in one location for days. Pragmatic townfolk cover her with false pipe organs, or hollow Easter Bunnies, and never, ever get close enough to hear her soft, sibilant whispers. Westpoint was established to keep the secret contained. Later, the task passed to HEX, loosely supervised by the Point.

There was a time when the curious wanted to communicate with Katherine. This failed and the Emergency Decrees forbade further attempts to interact with Katherine in any way. She is not spoken of to Outsiders. Penalties for disobeying the Decrees can be swift and harsh, even today.

Enter Tyler Grant and friends. They push the boundaries of what the Decrees allow, skirting the edge of the acceptable. Until the day they go too far.

Hex looks to the darkness in society, to how we shape our deepest fears, and so have the means to free ourselves from them. Too bad most people never realise this. We fear too deeply that which is unknown. Atrocity was visited upon Katherine, when colonists feared 'the work of the devil’. She was forced to make a terrible choice, then tortured, killed, and left a wretched trapped spirit. For three hundred plus years, the Black Rock Witch has been feared and shunned. She reflected back her own intense despair, leading others to kill themselves as she herself was forced to do.

Katherine's 'retaliations’ against assault to her personage seem less truly malicious attack, and often psychic survival mechanisms. When a modern day man opens her eyes and mouth, inoculated against her despair by his own that runs just as deep, the unexpected happens. Yet that doesn't stop the fully expected from playing out as well.

Katherine, truth be told, she never scared me. My heart cried for her on so many levels. I wanted to protect her, especially after Jaydon decided to abuse the witch, regardless of the consequences of those actions to others. No, what terrified me were the townspeople gripped by irrationality, making atrocious decisions that prove we really haven't evolved at all. It’s the 21st century, but it may as well have been the 17th instead. Terror brings out the truly nasty in people. It exposes prejudice and hatred. Bloodlust. I found I wasn't at all disappointed with the ending of the book. Call me callous or cynical, but sometimes, that's what is necessary. I really want to know how the orgnal Dutch translation plays out!

This book was written by a Dutch author, originally in that language. I love getting translated books whose first language wasn't English because they are fascinating glimpses into how another culture thinks. Most Americans would not be so bláse about a witch chillin’ in the corner of the communal room. Apparently, the Dutch are highly pragmatic regarding such things. They feared Katherine, but so long as she seemed 'tame’, they didn't freak out. Too much. It was when her patterns changed that all hell broke loose.

📚📚📚📚📚 I can't recommend this book enough! show less

I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of this book.

I loved the characters (especially Tyler and Stephen), I loved the setting, I loved the modern take on it, I loved it all. It's goddamn brilliant.

I have two, very niggling complaints. Once in a while, Heuvelt would bust out a phrase that really shouldn't have gotten by the editor, maybe once every forty pages or so. Each one would pop me out of the storyline momentarily due to its sheer incongruity.

INSERT: After having posted this, I realized the author is from the Netherlands and that this was translated, so I'm guessing the above issue may, at least in part, rest on the translator.

And also, once in a while, Heuvelt would slip into a God's-eye view of the town and the events and narrate show more directly to the reader as though they were observer. I get why he did it, but wasn't a massive fan of it.

But, for the sheer fun of the story and delivery of the goods toward the end? My god, this was just an amazing novel. show less

I picked up HEX because of the blurb Stephen King gave it. I am a lifelong horror fan, and have even tried to write some fiction myself, and one of my favorite tropes of the genre is the small town with a deep dark secret that will ultimately be exposed. There’s something about a rural setting and small town life that is the perfect façade for a lurking supernatural evil. While reading HEX I found echoes of Shirley Jackson’s THE LOTTERY, along with HARVEST HOME, a ‘70s bestseller by Thomas Tryon that might not be as well known as it used to be. And I definitely got a PET SEMETARY vibe from certain parts of HEX.

The small town in HEX is Black Spring, a little too on nose named community in the Hudson Valley that goes back to the show more days of the Dutch settlers, where in the 1660s, a woman named Katherine Van Wyler was accused of being a witch for supposedly raising one of her children from the dead. Part of her punishment was to have her eyes and mouth sewn shut lest she curse her accusers. But she was not gotten rid of so easily, and in the centuries since, Katherine has continually walked the streets of Black Spring, entering homes at will, placing all who gaze upon her under a curse whose full wrath will fall upon them if the sutures are removed, allowing Katherine to see and speak. The townspeople do their best to live with the situation, ignoring the witch who walks in their midst, and shielding her presence from the outside world. But the younger generation is increasingly unhappy with the status quo, and not content to simply ignore Katherine and her curse, thus setting in motion a series of actions which do not end well. Who is really evil, the witch whose whispers can drive the unwary to self harm, or the people who would make her choose between the lives of her two children, and sew her eyes and mouth shut? Did Katherine curse the people of Black Spring and their descendants, or is the curse a manifestation of their hate and fear, thus bringing it all on them and perpetuating it to the present day?

I found HEX to be one of those horror novels where you just have to go with the flow; at first, I didn’t find Katherine and her curse on Black Spring to be particularly compelling – people just ignoring a witch and going on with their lives was not exactly horrific. And the opening section made the story feel like a slow burn, but before the mid section, the supernatural elements really start to kick in, and the finale is pure apocalyptic horror. I felt that my patience and persistence was rewarded. The creepiness factor definitely went up as the book went along. The book’s main protagonists are the Grant family, with most of the attention focused on physician father Steve, and inquisitive older teen son, Tyler, and the switch in POV between them, and other characters, can be jarring, as it often means a shift in tone. I also think this book is not for everyone. Most of the female characters are not rendered sympathetically, which is a big negative for many readers; Griselda Holst, the town butcher, for example, is fat and dense, and physically unattractive, which is pointed out nearly every time she appears in the book. Robert Grim, the head of town security, is another character with a less than pleasant demeanor, and some noticeably offensive remarks for females. The author, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, is from The Netherlands, and seems to have a breast fetish which includes violence toward said body part. Some of the images invoked in the all-hell-has-broken-loose finale may be very off putting. It all comes down to the reader’s taste in horror, and what they consider to be a well written tale of terror, or a lazy piece of hack work with cheap scares.

Heuvelt originally wrote a version of this book that was set in The Netherlands, which has, in his own words, a more Dutch sensibility, along with a different ending. That’s a book I would like to read, but I do commend him on how well he seamlessly transferred his story to 21st Century America. Pulling off this kind of story in the digital age is not easy. show less