Let's Talk About Books

Welp, it's finished. Don't really have too many strong opinions. We'll see how this goes. 

Hex takes place in Black Spring, a town cursed by Katherine Van Allen. She doesn't seem to actually do anything to you, but she can make you want to do pretty horrible thing. The town quarantines themselves in a Puritanical attempt at Apple Pie America and hopes that so long as the witch's eyes and mouth remain sewn shut, things might be okay. But the more progressive youth of Black Spring have other plans and things quickly spiral out of control. 

Yeah, I'm pretty lukewarm about this one. The book is getting pretty decent reviews, and the premise was awesome. It was an interesting story and I enjoyed many parts of it. It had some really creepy parts, like the details of Fletcher's death and some pretty chilling Crucible-like scenes. It just didn't mesh together well for me and I was left feeling eh when it was all said and done. 

Part of the issue was the writing style. There was something about the way Olde Heuvelt writes that made it really confusing for me to understand what was going on. Like, I understood the individual words, but the way they were strung together in the sentence didn't comprehend. A lot of parts just felt cluttered, which made it kinda tedious to read. The beginning was honestly kind of boring up until they actually explained who the witch was and the nature of the curse. Until then it was just day in the life of this weird town.

One big thing that left me particularly unsatisfied was there were a lot of unanswered questions at the end. I don't mind some things remaining a mystery at the end of horror novels, but it felt almost careless, like Olde Heuvelt threw out these plot points and never bothered to follow them up. For example, why did the recording hurt Tyler but not Burak or the Outsider kid? Seemed inconsistent. Why did Fletcher hang himself? Who put the recorder on Tyler's pillow? Why did Katherine's mumblings convince people to kill themselves when at the end we learn she didn't want more death and destruction? Really, the list goes on and on and it ends with a really disjointed story.

So I don't know. I didn't NOT enjoy the book, it just didn't satisfy the way a good horror novel should. Read if you want something creepy but don't care too much about whether Points A and B fit together. 

Final rating: 3 out of 5 stars. This would have been a terrific story if the writing had just been a little more solid.