Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

 

Reviewed by Andrew

 

Hex by Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt is the story of a small modern-day New England town called Black Spring, which has been terrorized by the ghost of a witch for centuries. The witch has placed a curse on Black Spring, so that whoever lives there but tries to leave is overcome with suicidal urges. Because of this curse, the town goes to extraordinary measures to ensure that no one new moves there. In addition, over the years, the townsfolk have formed a special committee that attempts to hide the witch from visitors to Black Spring, and keeps track of the witch through security cameras that have been placed across town. It is strictly forbidden to interact with the witch in any way, with the committee doling out punishment to anyone who breaks the rules revolving around the witch. When several teenagers who live in Black Spring decide to film pranks performed on the witch for a social media site, it starts a series of horrific events that places the lives of everyone in Black Spring in mortal danger.

Personally, most “horror” books don’t really scare me that much (probably from being de-sensitized from watching too many horror movies), so I have been looking around for a while to find the scariest books ever. This book came up on several people’s top-ten horror lists, so I thought I would give it a try. The book does have a certain amount of suspense and dread, and as I read it, I was constantly reminding of Stephen King’s earlier, darker material. This book definitely has a very dark, grim tone, but its interspersed nicely with occasional humor and interesting fictional history about the town of Black Spring, and how the people who live there have dealt with the witch’s curse for close to 400 years. I also really enjoy when a story has multiple plots that all end up converging together towards the end, similar to Needful Things by Stephen King or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and Hex definitely had several interesting overarching plots. The story was also told in such a way that I had absolutely no idea how it would end.   I enjoyed reading as much of it as I could at a time, just to find out what happened in Black Spring next.

Something I wished the author had explored more is how the town of Black Spring deals with the outside world because of their curse. It was definitely touched on but I thought it would have been interesting to see more of the outside world’s view on the town. Maybe a scientific research team attempting to come to the town to try to discover how and why the curse works.  Still, I understood that the author wanted to keep the sense of extreme isolation that the people of Black Spring feel due to the curse.

The book also tends to be very bleak at times (I know, I know, I asked for a VERY scary horror book!)  It made me want to go read something much more light-hearted afterwards.

Overall, I did really enjoy this book. The plot was fast-paced, and always kept me engaged and wondering what was going to happen next in the small town of Black Spring. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of Stephen King or Dean Koontz, or someone who is looking for a good extra-scary book to read right before Halloween.