Hex Book Review

 Hello Interwebs!

So I've finally gotten back to the blog after a couple weeks and secretly I'm up late getting ready for work nights in the next couple days so I'm typing up a whole bunch of blog posts to be published in the next week or so. I've finished a lot of books in August so far. Seven and only two were short-ish: one a  book of poetry and another a short story/novella companion to another. These reviews will be mostly stand alone but as soon as I finish my current book I will be doing a three-in-one review of the Elin Hilderbrand books I've read this month (and adored). But anyway onto the first of many book reviews. 

The first book I finished in the month of August was Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. This is a adult horror novel  by a Dutch author and translated into English. I found out about this book via a YouTube booktuber, Chelsea Palmer, who read it as part of a reading vlog in mid-July. She gave it a decent rating/review and the premise sounded so intriguing that I absolutely had to read it. Here's the link to Chelsea's YouTube video if you're interested in it: Reading Vlog. It's blurbed by Stephen King and some other well known horror novelists as well so I had pretty high hopes for it. My library system actually had a hard copy of this book so I put a hold on it and read it when the hold came in. I read it from July 31, 2020 to August 6, 2020 and gave the book a 3.5/5 stars on goodreads. As always spoilers exist after the picture. 

So, Hex takes place in the fictional town of Black Springs, New York in the Hudson River valley which is like any other small upstate New York except that Black Springs is cursed. Anyone who lives in Black Springs is there until they die. And Black Springs is haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a woman who was accused and gruesomely executed by the townspeople in the 17th century. After her death her eyes and mouth were sewn shut leaving her to wander the town blind and mute. In the mid-20th century the army captured her and began to cut the stitches on her mouth free. When the first stitch was clipped both doctors gruesomely killed themselves and several elderly townsfolk dropped dead. Her whispers through the stitches are enough to drive a person to suicide. In the present day the town has developed HEX, a high-tech surveillance system connected to an app to track her movements through the town. The rules are easy: (1) no one leaves, (2) no one outside the town must know about her, (3) under no circumstances should you open her eyes or her mouth. And everything is fine...for a while. Then a group of boys get too curious and via a secret website they are posting and sharing videos of the witch with each other. Then they start doing experiments with her: they move a post into her path during her usual walk to see what happens. Then the innocent motives are corrupted by one of the boys who goes too far and attacks the witch before setting a dog on her. Within 24 hours the dog has disappeared and is found hanging in a tree. Then the boy who started the website gets into an altercation with the other boys and the witch and after deleting everything he has and telling the truth to his father the boys who attacked the witch are arrested adn publicly flogged before taken to a prison to be reeducated. When they get out, in an act of revenge the ringleader takes a recording of the witch's whispering he has and plays it to the boy who got him in trouble during the night. The next afternoon their parents come home to find the oldest brother has hung himself in the house and the younger brother's eyes have been sealed shut with glue. With the younger boy in the hospital, the dad goes insane with grief at his elder son's death. At the peak of his madness the witch appears and he clips the stitches silencing and blinding her free, setting her free in the town. As the town spirals into darkness the women and children are burned alive in the church and the rest end up drowning themselves in the river bringing the saga to a dark end.  

The book was dark and creepy and had a great atmosphere: fall and winter in upstate New York. I really enjoyed the blending of ancient and modern into one. The town has this very old colonial feel to it with the appeasement of the witch and her physical manifestation appearing various places in town. Then they track her with a network of security cameras all linked to the app on their phones. At the same time they still have some of the old rituals from the colonial days: including a wickerman style one around Halloween where the townspeople stuff a giant effigy of the witch with offerings and then burn it. The thing that I didn't like about it is both the same issue that Chelsea Palmer had with it and the problem that I have with Stephen King at times which is the unnecessary sexualization of things. I understand that the main group of characters being followed are teenage boys which think about sex constantly but the description of everyone and everything's breast got really stale really fast. There was also a distinct obsession the boys had with the witch's breasts and it was all very weird. 

All in all I enjoyed the story but it could've been better. A solid 3.5/5 stars. I don't regret reading it but I don't think that I will bother getting a copy of my own or rereading it. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle and Emma