Hex

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Thomas Olde Heuvelt?

I’m a Dutch guy who writes pretty scary novels. I started out pretty young, and even now, after five novels, I look younger than I am. So much that at signings, people always thought I was the minion helping with the book sale instead of the author. Two years ago — I was 30 then — I was having dinner with Peter Straub and Jeff VanderMeer and a bunch of other writers in Washington, and I was asked for ID when the waiters poured the wine. They thought I was their adopted child or something.

Oh, right, serious biography stuff. I also won a Hugo. And I have a novel out internationally in 2016 called HEX.

Your latest novel, Hex, will be published by Hodder in the UK. It looks rather fabulous: How would you introduce it to a potential reader?

Thanks — I’m totally in love with the cover. It’s so creepy! HEX is a creepy book about a modern day town, haunted day and night by a 17th century witch whose eyes are sewn shut. The town is virtually quarantined by its elders to prevent her curse from exploding. Frustrated with being kept in lock down, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting, but in doing so, send the town spiraling into… well, into very dark times, to frame it nicely. Also, I’d say that with HEX, I set off to write the scariest book I could imagine. I took elements from classical horror and tried to turn them around in a modern, twisted way. The witch’s haunting is very rock ‘n’ roll. She’s always there. She walks the streets day and night. She enters your home. She stands next to your bed for nights in a row. The town is bugged with cameras and there’s this control centre that tries to hide her from sight all the time. But besides the supernatural power, it’s a book mostly about human evil. Continue reading →

I tweeted about Thomas Odd Heuvelt‘s Hex yesterday, and figured that it also made sense to mention it on the blog. It looks interesting (not to mention creepy), and I’ve been hearing great things from people who have read it early. Here’s the synopsis:

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she’s there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

Hex is published in April 2016 in the US by Tor Books, in the UK by Hodder, and in the Netherlands by Luitingh-Sijthoff.