Review: 'HEX' by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, trans. by Nancy Forest-Flier

I have loved witches since I was a little child. One of these days I'm going to seriously sit down and dissect why women and social minorities are so drawn to these kind of Otherised, outcast characters, but for today all that matters is that I love them and was therefore immediately drawn to HEX. Add to that the fact it is an originally Dutch book (which I shamefully read in English) and I'm hooked. While it was a mixed reading experience, I did enjoy most of the ride. Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay.

Pub. Date: 4/28/2016
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

As some of you know, I'm half-Dutch and I spent the majority of my childhood reading Dutch books. It is a language that lends itself surprisingly well to literature, I think, especially when it expresses a certain Dutch attitude I like to call "caring coolness". Dutch people in general will be pretty chill about things, which may seem uncaring or unbothered, but underneath that is a lot of care. We're like a pot of water which only slowly comes to the boil. It will take ages, but once we're boiling it takes some time to cool us down. A lot of Dutch writing, in my experience (which I have to ashamedly admit has been very limited since I started reading books in English), is quite calm on the surface but tends to have rather strong emotions on the surface. This is also a trait of our comedy, which is often rather dark but always addresses social issues. As such, I somehow expected to find the same in HEX and I did. Olde Heuvelt also has the desire to address pick topics and themes, especially placing blind faith into institutions and the risk of becoming what you fear when fighting evil. As Black Spring obsessively tries to defend itself against the witch, it risks darkening its own soul to the point of damnation. 

Black Spring is haunted, but not in a spiritual sense. It is actively, physically haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th-century woman who still walks amongst them with her eyes and mouth sewn shut. At no time should her eyes be opened because disaster will surely follow. But Black Spring has kind of gotten used to its witch and to HEX, the organisation set up to deal with the haunting which monitors her presence 24/7 and prevents outsiders from finding out. But what is it like growing up in a community thus haunted and closed-off? And what happens when you become too comfortable with the threat in your midst? What will it do to you, when disaster may strike unexpectedly? This is the concept behind HEX and although it takes a bit of time to set up, I really enjoyed this premise. There was just something really fresh and intriguing to this idea that made me read through some of the less exciting aspects of the novel. At a certain point the escalation of the plot lost some of its impact, even if a lot of its finer details were still very intriguing. I also had a difficulty with some of the characters. Considering a witch is at the heart of the plot, we find out disappointingly little about her. Women are either self-sacrificing and loving angels or disgusting evil slobs, or at least that's how it comes across. The male characters are worked out a little more and it is through them that the novel's themes are worked out. While this was intriguing, there was a lot of telling rather than showing. When Olde Heuvelt did show, it definitely had impact.

As I said, I do like the occasional sparseness and directness of Dutch prose. There is not a lot of beating around the bush with it, but I don't know if it translates super well into English. Add to that that Olde Heuvelt apparently rewrote large sections of the book, changed the ending, and moved the whole plot from the Netherlands to America, and you get a book which feels a little rootless at times. By that I mean that some of the plot feels like it doesn't belong, like it can't find the connective tissue around it, or like it originally maybe had a different context. While the American setting still works, I wonder if sticking with the Dutch setting wouldn't have worked just as well. Olde Heuvelt is trying to tell, I think, a universal story of blind faith, fanaticism, and fear which isn't restricted to any one country or culture. (Although it is tied a bit to religion.) Some of the American aspects felt a little trite or odd, like a throwaway reference to America's Next Top Model which was absolutely not fitting to the moment. (Other things that don't really fit is the way nipples are mentioned weirdly often and an undertone of anti-Islam sentiment expressed by some characters which is never entirely explored or worked out in a way that feels appropriate.) Another issue I had is that I felt like he was trying to go too big and too far with it. The cynicism about humanity inherent to the plot is not something I fundamentally disagree with, but I think it could have been a lot more effective if it was restricted to a personal, intimate story rather than one that descends into a Hieronymus Bosch-esque disaster. A lot of aspects of HEX were fascinating to me and unfortunately a lot of these aspects were never explored further. Because Olde Heuvelt changed parts of the story I now wonder if I should read the Dutch version and maybe find some extra explanation there... At almost 400 pages HEX is long, but for those who are intrigued by the concept and want to see how it works out, I'd definitely recommend it.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

I adored the concept of HEX, the idea of this village dealing with a century-long haunting by a real, physical threat. While not all of the other elements worked for me, I was entertained enough to keep going. I was initially going to give this a 2, but in the end I was gripped enough to read it in two sittings, so I upped it to 3.