HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

The greats of fiction Stephen King and George R. R. Martin lead the fanfare for HEX, so be assured that Thomas Olde Heuvelt's debut English novel is both terrifying and unputdownable in equal measure.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

Reviewed by pamela on

4 of 5 stars

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Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex has done something very rare; he has brought something completely new to the horror genre. Hex feels impressively ancient, while playing on modern sensibilities to create a book that truly is horrific. It is a novel that will make you question yourself and really shows the truth in the old adage ‘hell is other people’.

Hex is a fascinating social analysis, and Heuvelt shows his characters as products of not just their circumstances, but also as individuals. Each character has enough depth to show their motivation, but not too much that the novel is bogged down with excess description. Everything has a place and a purpose, and nothing in his writing is left to chance. Because of this, we are introduced to a timely tale, that even though it uses the premise of an ancient evil feels incredibly modern and relevant. He teaches us that social fear and personal terror create far more horror than any perception of evil ever does on its own. We are our own worst enemies.

This is not to say that Hex is without fault. The entire plot feels dark, similar to the way Scandinavian crime novels feel in their settings, and so the change of location to rural USA for the English version rather than a Dutch setting felt somehow false. There was no reason to change it, and the novel would have felt far more genuine had the author kept the original I think. It also suffers from obvious statements of importance which made the plot feel a little mechanical in places. The plot would otherwise have been smooth, but statements stating how much worse things were going to get broke the flow.

Overall though, I can’t recommend Hex highly enough. It is a tale for our times with moments of true terror, sadness and sympathy. It is emotive, horrifying and subtly beautiful. It is well worth a read.

You can also read and comment on this review at my blog: http://iblamewizards.com/book-review-hex-by-thomas-olde-heuvelt/

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 17 November, 2015: Finished reading
  • 17 November, 2015: Reviewed