HEX (Olde Heuvelt novel)
A town terrorized by a witch whose stitches must never be removed.
HEX is a horror novel by Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt, first published in Dutch in 2013 and in English in 2016 through Tor Books. It was the first of Olde Heuvelt's novels to appear in English, with a translation by Nancy Forest-Flier that relocated the story from the Netherlands to the Hudson Valley in New York. Film and television rights for HEX have been purchased by Warner Brothers.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Thomas Olde Heuvelt
- Audio read by
- Jeff Harding
- Translator
- Nancy Forest-Flier
- Country
- Netherlands
- Language
- Dutch
- Genre
- Horror
- Publisher
- Luitingh-Sijthoff
- Published
- 2013
Facts from the source article.
Synopsis
The novel is set in the town of Black Spring, New York, where the ghost of the Black Rock Witch—formerly Katherine van Wyler, executed in 1664 with her eyes and mouth sewn shut after death—appears randomly throughout the town. Residents track her movements via the HEX mobile app to avoid her. The town enforces strict rules: no outsiders may learn of the witch, her stitches must never be removed, and leaving town for more than a few days causes suicidal urges. A group of teenagers, unhappy with this arrangement, secretly plans to broadcast the witch's existence worldwide, violating the ban on videotaping her. Their cocky recordings lead to internal tensions and a chain of events that threatens to exterminate the entire town.
Reception
Locus Online praised the English translation and noted that Olde Heuvelt's adoption of the North American venue was cannily done with no false steps. Jonathan Hatfull of SciFiNow compared the novel to Stephen King's Pet Sematary and Needful Things. Kirkus Reviews described the story as not merely unsettling but horrifying, with no redemption or hope, yet acknowledged it was well-done.
More in Novels About Witches and Witchcraft
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