Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

At age nine, I went door to door selling stamps for charity. A woman in a Carrie-style blood-covered nightgown appeared on one of the doorsteps. Probably expecting a doctor or an ambulance, instead, there was young me, stamps in hand, paralyzed and jaw dropping. My mom raised me properly, so I overcame my first inclination to run. Regaining my voice after several staggering moments, I said: “You must not be feeling very well, I’ll come back another day,” and then ran. Rattled to the bone, I never spoke about the encounter until years later, and to this day, I never found out what happened to the woman. But the following nights, of course, she appeared at my bedside, blood-covered gown and staring eyes—the stuff of nightmares. This—a door suddenly opening, beyond which something hideous awaits us—I later realized is a perfect metaphor for horror fiction. And sometimes, if we’re unfortunate enough, life. This image must still have been on my mind when I set out to write HEX. The journey the book has taken is beyond my wildest imagination. It has now been released in over twenty-five countries and I’ve met readers on tour on four continents. But wherever I go, or whatever corner of the world readers send me messages from, what they are scared of is universally the same. It’s that dark shape, standing at your bedside for nights on end, staring at you, not moving. Even behind her stitched eyes, you know she’s watching you.

It had broken their hearts, just as every unfulfilled dream breaks the human heart, but that was life.

I was particularly fascinated by the idea of creating Black Spring as an isolated micro-society where people are fundamentally condemned to each other, bound by the curse. There are many supernatural horrors in HEX, but this is a human horror to its core. It must be awful, especially to the young. Think about it: how would you react, if you knew you’d be convicted to live in the same place for the rest of your life? You’re young, you want to see the world. Grow. Travel. Find love. Get your heart broken. Except, none of that. Looking back at the lockdowns we all know what that means. But now imagine it’s forever.

You adapted, and you made sacrifices. You did it for your children or for love. You did it because of illness or because of an accident. You did it because you had new dreams … and sometimes you did it because of Black Spring.

The greatest works of literary horror, like Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, deal for a good part with grief, as grief is probably the strongest and most human reaction to horrific things happening to us. The newly introduced townsfolk of Black Spring, like the Grant family here, go through all the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—in their journey to come to terms with the fact that they accidentally sealed their fate. And yet, we pick up the pieces and go on, because that’s the only thing we can do besides going insane. I read Pet Sematary when I was eleven, by the way. It was the first adult horror novel I read, after endless whining to my mom. She saw this one had a kitty on the cover and thought it couldn’t be too bad. Boy, was she wrong. I am still grateful for it: the novel has fundamentally shaped me.

People desperately resisted the idea of their own death by looking away for as long as they could and avoiding the subject.

Yeah, ain’t we all a little scared of death? How do you deal with the fact of your own mortality in your daily life? Not a comfortable subject at your Thanksgiving family dinner, right? As for the people in Black Spring, death joins them at the dinner table every night. Whispering from that open corner in that stitched mouth.

Every last grain of idealism would be sacrificed on the altar of safety.

I loved the character of Tyler Grant, as so much of his idealism is part of myself. He proposes the idea of coming out of the closet with the witch—a nod to True Blood—as opposed to the town’s centuries old conservative policy of containment. It was a particularly poignant and sad situation when Steve, his father, even though admiring his son for his ideals, here needed to play them down in order to keep him safe from the town’s conservative engine—safe from being sacrificed on that alter. [SPOILER: This, of course, foreshadowing the lynching of another character later in the book. END OF SPOILER]. And hey, what might have happened if Tyler had succeeded? What if he indeed managed to get Discovery Channel to make a documentary about Katherine and open her up to the world... we might have seen a completely different outcome.

Magic exists in the minds of those who believe in it, not in its actual influence on reality.

Earlier in the book, I say that Black Spring forces even the most rational, scientific minds to revise their perception of the spiritual and the supernatural “in ways that were subtle, but drastic nonetheless.” Steve is an atheist and a man of science, and I love the thought he is having here, because you see this revision at work. He makes the point magic doesn’t exist, then ironically and perhaps even without realizing, contradicts himself by recognizing its influence on reality.

Colton Mathers was a life-form who had a lot in common with a marshy swamp: immune from evolution and sucking up every little mishap in its stinking depths, where it would never be forgotten.

The most fun I had writing HEX, next to Griselda and her peacock adventure, was with Robert Grim. I love Grim. His loathing observations of humanity and its dealings were a pure joy to me, because despite Grim being flawed, despite him essentially being an old grump, he is good at heart. Even when it all goes to hell, he tries to do good for the town. I love dark humor. Dutch humor is particularly dark, and a little blunt. This is tricky when a story travels beyond borders and cultures, as what’s considered funny in one place is not always the same in another. We had to adapt some of Grim’s original Dutch humor to get the message across, without making him seem like an insensitive dick. I remember my US editor asking me when she read the initial translation, “Why is he saying all these nasty things? Is the witch making him do that?” And I said, “No, he’s just having a bad day.”

They looked like people who knew they had done something dreadful, something irreversible … and something they could easily live with.

This was a pivotal scene in the book: I knew that if I could make you believe that a modern-day society in a modern-day town could spiral down into convicting three modern-day teens who’d done something dreadful to public torture in the middle of the town’s square, in front of some three thousand people who then go home and continue with their everyday lives... the book would succeed. Looking back at it, man, I make a pretty dark point about humanity here.

This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

The core message I wanted to convey in HEX is how little is needed for society to break down. It can happen almost in an instant. We’ve all seen it, right?

One evil spawned another, greater evil, and ultimately everything could be traced back to Black Spring. Black Spring had brought this upon itself.

I love the almost Biblical connotation of that last sentence, mirroring the original sin. Of course Katherine wasn’t evil. What she became existed only because of what the people of Black Spring had done to her. We know she had certain powers during her lifetime, true, but I believe she never intended for anything bad to happen. She was a misunderstood mother, who wanted only what was best for her children. The ending of HEX is about plain human evil, not supernatural evil. I love the scene when the town has turned into a mad mob on the square, dragging innocents into the burning church, and Katherine is witnessing this from atop the hill... crying. She never wanted this.

Damn those people. Damn their never-ending chain of selfish choices. Damn their refusal to seek reconciliation, damn their inability to love, damn their sick insistence to see the ugly, not the good.

In his ultimate state of grief, anger and madness, Steve becomes the image of the witch the town has always feared: he becomes vengeance, cursing the town and its people... and thereby, like all the others, making the wrong choice. For me, this inevitably closed the circle, only to be followed by what he eventually does in the epilogue. You know, I love a happy ending like anyone else. But sometimes in horror, there just isn’t one.

The knock came again.

The question readers ask me the most after reading HEX is: who’s knocking at the door, in the end? Was it Tyler? Was it the witch, or the authorities? Honestly, your answer is as good as mine. I never gave it much thought: when a story is done, it’s done. You can fill in the gaps. It was only years later that I suddenly knew, and when I did, my eyes turned wide and my heart started thumping in my chest. I am not going to reveal to you here who I think it was. But the answer is to be found in my novel Oracle—not a sequel to HEX, by the way, but one key character will return. Coming soon to English readers. The other question readers from around the world always ask me is: what was the original Dutch ending like? I figured this might be a good time to tell. Mind you: spoilers. In the original version, from the moment Steve cuts open Katherine’s eyes, things strongly deviate. Katherine basically becomes an evil superpower, wreaking havoc and getting her revenge on the townsfolk. The way she does it mirrors events and situations she’s been put through by them. For instance, screaming peacock sounds continuously emerge from the sewers, driving people crazy. Making people choose to save one child by sacrificing another. In the end, all were trapped in holes in a field and it started raining burning coals, mirroring the way Katherine was stoned by the boys in the well. It was all very Dante-esque or Hieronymus Bosch-like hell-on-earth, and Clive Barker’ishly gruesome. Honestly, it was all a bit much. When it originally appeared in 2013, some people loved the ending. Some people hated it. When a couple years later I read the translation with a fresh and more distant eye, I felt it just broke character with whom Katherine was: a misunderstood mother. I felt I could make the book creepier and more powerful by making it more subtle, and leave evil at its original source, the townsfolk. Rarely does an author get a chance to improve a published book for an entirely new audience, but here I had, so I decided to take it. I like the new ending better. So did my Dutch publisher, who asked me to translate it back to Dutch. It’s been in the revised Dutch edition for years, now.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks for reading this. I hope you enjoyed these insights, and I hope you enjoyed the book. I have a new one coming out, called Echo, in 2022. Many readers have told me they were genuinely creeped out by HEX. I took it as an incentive to write the scariest opening I could think of. A young woman wakes up alone in a chalet high up in the mountains, in the dead of night. She needs to use the bathroom, but when she hits the top stair, she sees there are people in the staircase, staring up at her. Frightened, she goes back to bed, where of course she realizes she must have imagined the whole thing. She returns to the stairs. But the people are still there. And they have come a little closer. Twenty pages in, many readers had to put Echo aside for a bit, and told me they had to turn to pics of pups and kittens before they could continue. So I dare you to read it. And please, let me know if you were braver than the Dutch. Echo is my homage to the American gothic. It is the story of a man possessed by forces of nature—a man possessed by a mountain. Sprung from my own experience as a mountaineer, the novel contains everything I know about storytelling, about the wild, about identity, about obsession. At its core, there’s a beautiful love story between two extraordinary people. Last but not least, there is a small but clear reference to HEX in Echo. I challenge you to find it and let me know. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53329253-echo