Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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.