HEX and Human Tendency

I keep coming across these books that are accidentally relevant and I hope that never ever changes.

Who says horror can’t be thoughtful?

I discovered Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt one day while perusing Amazon for some horror/thriller reads and oh my lord am I glad I did. I’m going to do my best to explore this book without giving the plot away but that’s going to be a challenge.

“Whoever is born here is doomed to stay ‘til death. Whoever settles never leaves.”

The Grant family live in the sleepy town of Black Spring, just on the edge of Hudson Valley in New York. It’s almost Halloween time and the colors of fall take hold and turn the Valley into beautiful autumn fire. The town seems like the kind of place anyone would want to live and raise children except the town lives with a well kept secret. Her name is Katherine and both she and the town are cursed. Katherine is a centuries old witch who haunts the town, showing up at will wherever she feels, from your bedroom, to your grocer’s freezer and may stay there for days on end until she moves on to the next place.

But there’s something else.

Her eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and mute she walks the town, this Black Rock Witch, and the townspeople sort of exist around her. They deal with her like you would a stray cat, ignore it and hope it goes away. In one instance, someone hangs a dishtowel over her face and goes about her business. Simple as that.

A group of teenagers living in the town grow impatient with the regulations set down by the Council about how they must all live and work around the witch. They do what teenagers do and they start messing with her, pushing the boundaries of the council and the witch. But as their antics increase, the habits of the witch start to become erratic. It’s almost as if, instead of wandering blind, she actually has been watching the people.

There’s more to this book than this horrifying idea of a cursed town and a mutilated witch. This book evoked so many emotions in me and I don’t even know where to start. At the crux of this book is one simple idea that has existed as long as humans have and has never failed in proving itself to be true: People never change. Things never change.

It’s more than just frustrated teenagers and complacent adults. Katherine represents a larger aspect of life. She’s the elephant in the room. A problem that exists that we refuse to acknowledge and talk about and change. At the base of who we are is the idea that we never get past our inherent urge to judge and assume and then punish. It isn’t until after we condemn someone that we see whether or not we were right or wrong. That basic human tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

Once upon a time, Katherine was just a woman. Shitty people made her what she had become. She is existing proof that the sins of the past will always haunt us and that we will always shoot first and take something innocent and destroy it.

There are always exceptions to that characteristic, of course, but mob mentality rules. Where there are those that challenge the status quo, there are those that are punished for it. It’s a never ending cycle we’re caught in.

I cannot recommend Hex enough. It’s gripping and moving to the very last word. It’s creepy and unsettling and it plays on a range of emotions. It sheds light on problems that still exist in the world today.

Let’s acknowledge the faults in our histories and change them moving forward…

...instead of just covering them with dishtowels.