HEX Kindle Edition

It's been a long time since I've been this sickened by a book. The suspense building in this book is insidiously delightful. I love how well done the foreshadowing is. The writing kept me immersed, and I did not want to put this book down! Highly recommend if you're the kind of person that thinks humans are the real monsters.

“Nothing’s normal here.”Katherine van Wyler was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1664 but that’s not where her story ends. Hundreds of years later, the Black Rock Witch remains, her eyes and mouth sewn shut.Once you move to Black Spring, you will never live anywhere else. The residents of this insular community are used to living alongside this emaciated, chained woman but they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security. If Katherine’s eyes ever open, her power will be unleashed.This book has been on my radar for years and waited patiently on my Kindle for two. The upcoming release of the sequel gave me the perfect excuse to dive in and then I almost didn’t finish it. To be honest, if I hadn’t already committed to reviewing the sequel, I probably wouldn’t have.“She’s not going to let you go. You live in Black Spring now. That means the curse is on you as well.”It’s rare for a book to have a negative impact on me. Reading is my joy. Even when I read memoirs of people who have experienced the horrific, I find hope in their resilience.This book, though, had a significant impact on my mental health. You could say it did its job, with the witch reaching out from the pages to infect me with her curse. It got to the point where, each time I started reading, I’d think ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’I don’t think of myself as a reader with many rules. I’m happy to wander between genres and dip my toe into unfamiliar territory. Do what you want to the humans, especially if we’re in a slasher, and I’ll likely forgive you. I may even cheer you on. If you harm my fictional animals, though, we’re going to have a problem. I had a big problem with what the animals, one in particular, experienced in this book.I don’t want you to think this wasn’t a good book. It was. It was well written. I got attached to a couple of the characters. I needed to know what hell was going to be unleashed once Katherine’s eyes opened. But wow, it really did a number on me.“Peacocks. You know what that means, right?”Content warnings are included on my blog.I’m rounding up from 3.5 stars.

I owned this book a long time before I finally read it. I had just finished a long awesome series and was having a hard time choosing my next book. I saw this on my shelf and then checked the reviews and decided to read it. It started a little slow for me but pretty soon I was hooked and I finished it in one day.

If only he had apologized in the preface, I would have saved myself some time.I truly wish there were "half star" options, because this is a two-and-a-half star book if ever there was one. It has moments of suspense, moments of terror, but these are scattered pearls on a long rope of "who cares" writing and storytelling. The book is not just too long for the story, it feels positively bloated. An editor could have cut 100 pages and the reader wouldn't have missed a thing.The author draws heavily on two famous works of fiction to move the action in this book: The Monkey's Paw and Pet Semetary. At times, the book seems not so much a homage to these two stellar bits of storytelling as a blatant rip-off. Characterization is also inorganic. Characters in Hex's final chapters behave so differently than they had throughout the book that the reader is left scratching his or her head saying, "He did what?" The first scenes try ... but fail...to presage the end. It's as if early in the book a character cuts a watermelon in two, and from that you're supposed to say, "Oh, of course he bisected his sister. You knew that was going to happen because of the watermelon scene."For me though, the worst was this....SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERSThe author could not decide whether the Katherine was...not to sound too much like the Wizard of Oz...a good witch or a bad witch. The end of the book implies that the evil in the town was not a matter of witchery, but of the latent evil in the hearts of the residents. But that negates the 300 pages preceding, which describe the witch hexing people, keeping them captive in town, killing a bunch of scientists, causing one of the protagonist's sons to hang himself, and causing another to go blind. This is not artful ambiguity. This is a matter of the author being unable to make a decision.Save your money. Re-read Pet Sematary.

This book has some moments that I'd consider legitimately scary. I'd never been actually spooked by a book before.Solid folk horror read!

Como puede haber alguien que le haya puesto una, dos o tres estrellas a este libro.Quien abrió el museo y dejo que tremenda obra saliera.

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.

Una maldición que todos asumen con mucha normalidad. La premisa me pareció entretenida, graciosa y diferente. A partir de las 100 páginas o así, deja de ser un libro gracioso y se oscurece. La peor maldición no es convivir con una bruja, la maldición es la condición humana, nuestros miedos, fanatismos e irracionalidad.

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.