Hex by Thomas Olde Huevelt

From Goodreads:
Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay 'til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters your homes at will. She stands next to your bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting, but in so doing send the town spiraling into the dark, medieval practices of the past. 

Content warning: This book contains scenes of sexual assault/violence and violence towards children and animals.

I actually read this in July, but I forgot to post a review for it here. Oops. 

I stayed up until 4am finishing this book, knowing full well I had to be at work for 10 in the morning, but I needed to know how it ended.

At first this book wasn't that scary, with Heuvelt giving the readers a false sense of security. "This isn't scary at all!" I thought to myself, during the first 150 or so pages. Oh, how quickly I was proven wrong. An event happens about a quarter-to-a-third of the way through the book that changes the playing ground, and Hex goes from being a lighthearted book with something not right in the atmosphere, to a full-on stay-up-until-4am-with-all-the-lights-on scary.

Something that Heuvelt does is he combines Old World superstition with New World ideals and technologies. An app to track what the witch is doing? Sounds a lot like town logs and registers that would have been used in the 17th century, not to mention the remaining belief in the existence of this witch. The small-town factor plays a lot into the superstitions as well. The novel portrays small-town life fairly well, at least for Europe, anyhow. I don't think many of the things that happen in this translation as far as town events (outside town meetings perhaps) would happen in a small American town. That's the one teeny-tiny minor thing about this novel is that it's a translation from the original Dutch. It's a great translation, but there are always things that can't be translated or are missed or lost in translation that add an extra factor. 

I enjoyed how quickly the town turned on each other in this book, With tensions running high once regulations about the witch had been thrown out the window, fingers were pointed, people were blaming neighbours, former friends, and family members, all so that the blame would not be set on them. What Heuvelt does so well is make the reader suspect everyone, which, if done correctly, is very effective in creating even more tension. It's interesting to see how quickly old practices of interrogation and suspicion return. While this is fictional, it shows a window into how people interact in situations like this in real life.  


Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. It started out giving the audience a false sense of security before going in for full creep factor. I loved the location and the atmosphere of the novel, and enjoyed all the twists and turns that this book takes along the way. Initially. I was going to give this a 3.5, but thinking about it after I finished it, I'm bumping it up to 4/5.