HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

A witch's curse results in a surveillance state

A family sits down for dinner after a busy day at work and school.

“Oh, by the way,” says Mom, “There’s a centuries-old witch standing in the corner of the room. I threw a dishcloth over her face, so she doesn’t put us off our food.”

I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of how the inhabitants of Black Spring, New York deal with being perpetually haunted by the ghost of the Black Rock Witch, Katherine van Wyler. They get on with their lives — at least, as best as they can.

Katherine can appear anywhere in the town without notice. One moment she could be in the middle of downtown — the next, in someone’s living room.

With sewn-up eyes and mouth, she’s not just incredibly creepy, she poses a very real threat to the lives of those forced to live with her; some were born and raised in Black Spring, others are “newcomers” — but all are stuck with Katherine indefinitely. For once a soul spends a night in Black Rock, Katherine will never let them go. Spend too long away, and she will somehow cause suicidal compulsions.

Naturally, it pays to keep an eye on what the witch is up to and where she pops up across town. Thus, there’s a local authority known as HEX that keeps tabs on Katherine’s whereabouts via a network of security cameras scattered around town, as well as a HEX App that allows residents to update when she suddenly appears inside their homes.

But growing up in such a surveillance state is far from ideal, and so the town’s teenage digital natives start experimenting with testing the limits of the authoritarian existence they’ve grown up with. Just how tight a leash does HEX really have on the inhabitants of Black Rock? And can Katherine’s behaviors be influenced by the living... for better or worse?

What starts as a sinister-yet-Spielbergian suburban horror story slowly snowballs into something else altogether. Olde Heuvelt does a bang-up job of drawing you into the lives and minds of an assortment of key characters, revealing the variations and complexities that exist among this small town that’s both trapped with the witch and each other.

Compared with Olde Heuvelt’s follow-up, Echo (which I read first), I do think that HEX is relatively lacking in emotional depth and literary flair, yet those are minor quibbles.

HEX remains an incredibly ambitious horror novel in its own right, dealing as it does with hefty contemporary themes such as the collective versus individualism, social media and isolation, and personal freedoms versus social responsibilities.

It's actually quite remarkable how very American this book feels. Olde Heuvelt is, of course, a Dutch author, but when HEX was picked up for Stateside publication, he not only worked with a translator but also rewrote significant aspects of the book to more authentically transpose its setting from the Netherlands to New York state.

In doing so, he apparently tweaked some of the characters to make them more American — a decision which had ramifications as these altered personalities caused the thrust of the plot to deviate from the original Dutch version of the book, meaning that the HEX sold in US bookstores has a markedly different ending than that found in Europe.

I have no criticism of the ending of the US version of HEX. It feels entirely appropriate after everything that precedes it. But I would love to know more about the original version. Sadly, it seems there’s no straight-translation available, and Olde Heuvelt himself isn’t telling. But if anyone out there knows, I’d love to find out — drop me a note in the comments.