Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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.