Hex

I first stumbled across Thomas Olde Heuvelt last year when I read Echo, which totally blew me away, so much so that I immediately added Hex to my ever-growing TBR pile but put off reading it until this year. You know the way of these TBR piles. But when I heard Oracle was a continuation of Robert Grim's story (or maybe a prequel), Hex moved up higher on my TBR. And if I thought Echo was an amazing read, Hex surpassed that. Black Spring is an idyllic little town nestled in the Hudson Valley of New York State. On the outside, it appears life in this town is perfect, like you imagine small-town life would be. Think Mayberry, if you remember The Andy Griffith Show. They even have their own resident celebrity -- Katherine van Wyler, a centuries old witch who wanders the streets and drops in unexpectedly on families and often overstays her welcome. You would think having a resident witch would be awesome, that they town would have a thriving tourist industry, that they would do everything they could to exploit the woman's presence since Katherine comes across as a curiosity more than anything else. She sticks to her routine, and for the most part, you could set your watch by the times she makes certain appearances about town and never appears to be outwardly threatening. But the woman and the town have a history, and history shows the witch could be unpredictable. As a result, they have certain rules and regulations that are religiously adhered to, and violations of these laws often result in archaic forms of punishment. They have a system in place that monitors the witch's appearance, and God forbid she should appear in public and hang around, they have measures in place to make certain outsiders do not become aware of her presence. They also attempt to keep out the outsiders, and those who ignore the warnings and decide to make Black Spring their home... Well, they've more or less signed their lives away, and the lives of their children, and their childrens' children, because, you see, what goes on in Black Spring stays in Black Spring. It's like a roach motel: you can visit, and all is well, but live in Black Spring and you can never leave. Any attempt to do so can result in insanity, and even death. But as with any strictly regimented communities, there are those who seek to rebel. Aside from the few adults who resent their current living conditions, you have the teens, and in this particular case, a handful of teens who, in an age of social media, resent having their freedoms monitored or restricted and have established an underground society/club that is gathering evidence with the planes of going public with their dirty little secret. They think that by doing so, they will break the Black Spring curse and regain not just their freedom but those of the townsfolk as well. But there are those in town who are content to let sleeping dogs lie and will go to any extreme to make sure the town keeps its secrets. I know some of the reviews for Hex have been negative, citing that the book is not scary. The book, however, is terrifying in that we are witness the extent to which superstition can govern a community, and any attempt at change can start the gradual unraveling of a civilized society until they are reduced to a primal mob mentality resistant to any form of logic or reasoning. It's made all the more horrifying by what is revealed at the book's conclusion. Overall, I think Hex is small-town horror at its best. Heuvelt paints a chilling picture of what superstition and living in a constant state of fear can drive men to do, and how the tension of living with that constant fear can build until it finally explodes and how quickly civilized society can devolve to primitive levels. Highly recommended.

I chose this book for a book club I am a part of. I wanted a good fantasy/horror book. It’s definitely fantasy. It has a few horror-esque moments but in my unprofessional opinion, I wouldn’t stack this with my other horror books. The beginning was difficult to follow simple because the author was introducing so many characters at once. I lost sight of who was a child or adult, who was related to who, who was relevant, who was working for the town and who was a regular citizen. By the end, I still wasn’t completely clear but it didn’t take away from the story because a lot of those characters probably could have been left out completely. There were a few lulls in the book; boring characters and over explaining but nothing that was difficult to push through. For me, a lot of witch stories end up being cheesy but the author did an AWESOME job of keeping the witch mysterious, genuine and spooky. The plot and ending were predictable but it’s truly what I wanted to happen so I was excited when it did. The character development and what happened to who at the end was NOT predictable which made for a bit of a cliff hanger. Overall it was an awesome story, I just wish it had less character exposition in the first half. It took some discipline for me to get to the half way mark.

So the story was good. It hooked me at the start when everyone knew of the witch and it was a “normal” thing. Then it kept me in when things started unfolding with the new generation. Then when things went downhill I was reading excited to see where it went. Although the end was crazy, I got lost a bit but still liked it. It was unexpected and good.

One of the best books on Kindle Unlimited I've read in awhile. Really fun and intriguing horror with a solid history repeats itself theme. Resetting the book in the US I would have loved more of a nod to the indigenous populations' beliefs about the town in this book but I understand that being a lot to tackle in a rewrites, when you're also European. But pretty much nothing I would change! I hope all of this author's works are published in English. I've read the plot summaries for all of them and the author seems adept at something I'm mentally categorizing as "communal horror." I need to read them all!

Heuvelt is a young writer so don't expect this book to have the polish of a Neil Gaiman book or the hauntingly beautiful prose of a Bracken MacLeod story. What you can expect and what will be delivered is an engaging tale that is based on the writer's experience as a child. He will tell you that story in the Acknowledgements at the end. For all its little problems--the quick point of view changes and a few awkward dialogues--it is a very good book for readers who like a witch who is more than a sexy miscreant who likes kissing frogs and emasculating males. Katherine is terrifying in her silence and her blindness because we are aware that she sees everything and speaks to us of death and sorrow in whispered words. She is everywhere and nowhere. The larger story here is that the evil we see in others is often a reflection of ourselves; a reflection that we refuse to recognize. The delight is in how quickly the antagonist becomes the protagonist and how beautifully that is performed at the end. This is a scary book and asks uncomfortable questions of the reader. I highly recommend it to those who aren't afraid of stories about powerful women who aren't based on a sexual template. This book is about raw power based in a mother's love and her need to be answered when she demands justice or is it revenge. You decide.

This was one of the more surprising books I've read this year, in that its probably one of the most solid horror novels of 2016 yet it hasn't received that much fanfare. I wouldn't have heard of this if I hadn't seen it in a friend's Facebook feed and it looks like much of its readership comes more from word of mouth than an intense media marketing campaign. That's good in some ways but bad in others, as this very much deserves more readers than it has received. What impressed me so much about this book was how much it relied on human evil as opposed to supernatural evil. There's a definite supernatural presence, so much so that the townsfolk have learned how to adapt their lives to the constant presence of the Black Rock Witch, to the point where it actually ends up making some of the townspeople complacent. I will try not to elaborate too much at the risk of spoilers, but it's likely the adults' begrudging acceptance of "this is how it is" that causes the teenagers to start recording and even taunting the Black Rock Witch. It's natural for children to try to see how far they can bend or break the rules as a way of challenging authority and while they know that the witch is deadly, they've also grown up with the knowledge that not much (if anything) will happen as long as you don't touch her, listen to her words, or undo any of her bindings. That leaves a lot open to interpretation. Another thing that intrigued me is that the witch isn't entirely portrayed as this horrible evil thing. This I can't really spell out without spoilers, but I will say that Olde Heuvelt does try to show that life does not deal in absolutes and that actions can have an impact on outcomes. I will warn people that this book is slow moving, so much so that the action doesn't really get started until the last fourth of the novel. You can see where things are going and there is tension, it just takes a while for the powder keg to explode here. This isn't entirely surprising since there has been a lot of movement towards books of this type, but I know that this won't be everyone's cup of tea. I suppose the best endorsement I can give this book is that I started listening to this on audiobook and ended up purchasing an e-book copy because I got so into the novel that the audiobook version just went too slowly for me.

That's what I wanted to scream at the main character of this heartwrenching novel - a doctor, although that's not important to the plot. I discovered this novel nine years late, thanks to a book YouTuber who called it one of the scariest horror novels she'd ever read. It didn't scare me because I'm hard as nails - okay, okay, as I sat up into the wee hours of the morning reading like mad to get to the finish I did call my dog to come sit next to me so I could feel safe, but really... So much of it was the stuff of my childhood nightmares, but the emotional heart of the story is what got me. There are obvious similarities in theme to two novels that were made into movies, "The Woman in Black" and "Pet Semetary", but it's not really like either of them. I was reminded also of the witch in "Something Wicked This Way Comes", but it's not really like that, either. It strongly reminded me of a movie that's quite different on the surface, namely "The Wicker Man" - a seemingly charming village isolated from its normie neighbors in order to hide a dark secret, hiding, disguising, lying, and then all Hell breaks loose, revealing ancient, cruel superstition under a thin skin of modernity, and the nihilistic selfishness of a populace willing to commit any atrocity to save its own neck. I don't know if the author intended this, but one of the themes that struck me was that of brutality towards women. There's a sharp parallel between the character of the undead witch and one of the female townsfolk - both mothers without male protection, both abused in every way, both rejected, scapegoated, subjected to sexual degradation, and both forcibly put at odds with their sons. Well, I won't spoil it, but I will say it brought me to tears at several points. I also noticed that the town functions like a textbook toxic family with all its cruel dynamics and enforced roles, and that this is mirrored even in the superficially happy, healthy family to which we are first introduced. With impressive skill, the author leads us deeper and deeper into the rank, unloving heart that beats at the center of all this cheerful domesticity, making excuses for itself as it charges into the darkness. This is no cheap book of scares, but a perceptive psychological study that will just happen to scare the socks off many readers. I'm grateful to the YouTuber who gave it such a glowing review and am eager to read more from this talented writer.

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.

With his original approach to the topics of a cursed small town and witchcraft, Heuvelt gives us a deep insight into human relationships creating a setting and a plot that reminded me of good old Stephen King.

This book is one of it's kind . And will keep you intrigued till the end. Must read for all horror lovers

Really good folk horror. A little long maybe, but the story was good, the characters believable and it moved along at a reasonable speed. Very entertaining

Im 17.Jahrhundert wird die "Hexe" Katherine van Wyl von den Bewohnern ihres Dorfes bestialisch umgebracht. Seit damals findet sie keine Ruhe und sucht die Bewohner der Kleinstadt Black Springs auch in ihren Häusern heim. Ein alter Aberglaube hält die Bewohner dieses Ortes für immer in ihm fest. Wer ihm längere Zeit fernbleibt oder auszubrechen versucht, bezahlt mit seinem Leben. So will es der "Fluch der Hexe", deren zusammengenähte Augenlider niemals geöffnet werden dürfen. Sonst droht der Untergang.. Je mehr der Leser in den dumpf-provinziellen Alltag von Black Springs eindringt, desto mehr Fragezeichen ergeben sich für ihn. Ist es wirklich der Hexenfluch, der die Bewohner in seinem Bann hält-oder ihr eigener Wahn, einem Gemisch aus provinzieller Kleingeisterei und nicht bewältigter Schuld? Der Roman gibt darauf keine eindeutige Antwort, ein Ende mit Schrecken ist aber gewiss... Fans von Stephen King werden diesen Roman lieben, Freunde des gepflegten Provinz-Horrors ebenfalls!

interesting premise, but not that scary. doesn't exactly stick the landing, but I'm not that mad. I kept waiting for a twist or a big reveal that felt like it never really came. wish I could have felt closer to the characters.