themoosejthm | HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Reply)

Another book I finished recently was HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. It was described to me as a horror story but it's really a Family Drama with horror elements and I liked it. It was good. This is the summary:

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. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear. The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated by being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers, decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

The ghost is absolutely where the horror elements come in, in case you were wondering, but there is also the more banal “humans are the real monsters” horror as well, which make for a really good, lived in place. The ghost is a corporal entity that haunts this town and has been since she was tried and found guilty of witchcraft. And since that was a few centuries ago, the people of Black Spring have become used to her presence which makes for some really funny black humor at times as well – things like our main family dealing with “their guest” by leaving her in the living room with a dishtowel over her head because, even with her eyes sewn shut, you know she's looking at you. And it creeps you out.

Or like the fact that there's a local app used to report where the witch is at all times because, naturally, you'd like to know if the witch is going to be in front of the pasta at the local market before you make the decision to make some for dinner.

I also really enjoyed the way that as the story progressed, the main family seems more like actual people with flaws and not just the typical horror family that doesn't deserve this shit, they're so pure and wholesome. This family argues about petty shit, they have a middle and high school-er who act like preteens and teenagers, respectively. The parents have favorite kids but they love both of their children as much as they can. They have a dog, who is important to the story but I am sorry to say does not live to the end. T.T

I also really enjoyed the ending and I'm intrigued to know that the Dutch version has a different ending. I wonder if it's happier? Bc this ending is a bummer for our main family and I loved that, it felt earned.

Though the one con for this, other than the dog doesn't live, is that this author has a weird Islamophobia thing going on that would pop up sometimes like the Witch herself appearing in someone's kitchen. It's mild and might be a comment on Americans and Islam but I did notice it and it was weird. Esp since it would just appear sometimes in a very “oh, you don't realize that's hella racist, do you?” way and it was jarring. I still can't quite put my finger on if that's the author's bias coming out or if it was supposed to read as the character's biases, but I noticed and it felt weird.

But this book? 8/10