HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
HEX is the first of Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s five novels to be translated into English, a powerful and riveting tale of witchcraft and a town’s slow and ghastly descent into madness.
In 1664 Katherine van Wyler was forced to kill her own child and then sentenced to death for witchcraft in the Hudson Valley town of Black Spring – a crime the townspeople have been paying for ever since. Katherine’s ghost pops up everywhere, in the midst of a town festival, at the bedside of a child, in plain view on Main Street. She makes for a pathetic figure, bound in iron chains, her mouth and eyes sewn shut to prevent her from causing more havoc.
Yet havoc she does cause. Residents of Black Spring may leave the town for short durations, but for those that linger too long in the outside world, the urge for suicide becomes overpowering. You buy a house in Black Spring, as one newly arrived couple learns, you never get to leave.
Teenager Tyler Grant finds the limitations of life in Black Spring intolerable. He recruits some friends, including one budding sociopath, to help him post videos of the witch on the internet, thus violating Black Spring’s most powerful taboo – thou shalt not let the outside world know about the witch. What begins as little more than a prank unleashes an ever-widening circle of hell, one that sweeps Tyler and his family up in a horrific chain of events.
Heuvelt rewrote the Dutch version of HEX for an American audience, changing the setting to the Hudson Valley and, according to the author, writing a new and even more shocking ending. Whatever the language, it’s a chilling novel on many levels – from cruel seventeenth century customs to a harrowing and deeply disturbing vision of human nature.
In 1664 Katherine van Wyler was forced to kill her own child and then sentenced to death for witchcraft in the Hudson Valley town of Black Spring – a crime the townspeople have been paying for ever since. Katherine’s ghost pops up everywhere, in the midst of a town festival, at the bedside of a child, in plain view on Main Street. She makes for a pathetic figure, bound in iron chains, her mouth and eyes sewn shut to prevent her from causing more havoc.
Yet havoc she does cause. Residents of Black Spring may leave the town for short durations, but for those that linger too long in the outside world, the urge for suicide becomes overpowering. You buy a house in Black Spring, as one newly arrived couple learns, you never get to leave.
Teenager Tyler Grant finds the limitations of life in Black Spring intolerable. He recruits some friends, including one budding sociopath, to help him post videos of the witch on the internet, thus violating Black Spring’s most powerful taboo – thou shalt not let the outside world know about the witch. What begins as little more than a prank unleashes an ever-widening circle of hell, one that sweeps Tyler and his family up in a horrific chain of events.
Heuvelt rewrote the Dutch version of HEX for an American audience, changing the setting to the Hudson Valley and, according to the author, writing a new and even more shocking ending. Whatever the language, it’s a chilling novel on many levels – from cruel seventeenth century customs to a harrowing and deeply disturbing vision of human nature.
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