Hex Is a Suburban Gothic Nightmare
The suburbia-as-purgatory trope is given a black magic twist in Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex, a gothic nightmare set in a hermetically sealed town descending into chaos due to the influence of a walking supernatural abomination. Its cookie-cutter streets turn sinister in a tale loaded with dark imagery and a darker outlook on human nature. It is a harrowing fable about belief, tradition, and societal collapse, and promises great and terrible things for English-language readers sampling their first poisoned-laced bite of the Dutch author’s novel-length work (his novelette The Day the World Turned Upside Down won a coveted Hugo Award last year).
The town of Black Springs is cursed. The Black Rock Witch, bound in chains, her eyes and mouth sewn up with thread, wanders freely through the streets, sometimes appearing in people’s houses. No one born in Black Springs can never leave it, nor anyone who moves there. The town is kept under strict, high-tech surveillance by its elders, who are determined to keep it isolated from the outside world, both to keep knowledge of the witch from escaping, and to keep newcomers from moving into town and falling under her curse. When a group of teenagers break the rules and attempt a viral spread of information about the Witch, it sets off a violent chain of events. The town becomes unhinged, society collapses, and the residents take up medieval practices of the distant past with disturbing vigor.
Though it’s a story about a curse, the Black Rock Witch isn’t necessarily the villain. Heuvelt is less concerned with the Witch wreaking havoc than with the characters using her as an excuse to turn on each other—the Witch doesn’t act so much as react, and even as her powers grow and the town spirals further into hell, the greater horrors are committed by its all-too-human citizens. The foolish teenagers’ decision to mess with a power they don’t understand could perhaps be excused; the town elders’ plan to enforce archaic, Draconian laws—laws that demand public torture as punishment for misdeeds—decidedly less so. Soon, the witch seems but an excuse, as people first murder each other in fear of her influence, then turn to her as an object of worship.
Watching this slow disintegration of a society gives the novel its hypnotic allure. We know from the outset that things are going to go wrong, badly wrong, but Heuvelt (with an able assist by translator Nancy Forest-Flier) takes his time engineering the disaster. Rather than demolish the entire house at once, he removes one board at a time, and we’re never quite sure when it’s all going to come crashing down. It’s a black gift, the ability to so effectively make us fear a collapse we know is coming, as each new incident weakens the structure of the normal and everyday, cracking the beams that support our understanding of what it means to be civilized.
Hex is horrific and disturbing, yes, but its horror is far more complex than simple bloodletting. The witch holds sway over Black Springs, but its the human monsters who have the sharpest teeth, and they’ll bite into you, hard, and refuse to let you go until they’ve dragged you down with them.
Hex is available April 26.