Sarah's Library

This review may contain spoilers

6/6 - First of all: those damn kids, and why did it have to be the dog?!

20/6 - Finally getting around to finishing this review! I've been binge reading romance since I finished this and having internet problems that have left me feeling no desire to write, but now I have a huge backlog of reviews to write which are hanging over my head and every time I read I think about the fact that I'm probably forgetting more and more of the books I haven't written about.

Hex was one of those books where you're not sure where the scare, the evil is going to come from. To start with I thought it would be the expected scare - the idea of a 17th century witch who is allowed to walk through town, can't be contained or touched and must have her eyes and mouth kept sewn shut to prevent her evil from spilling out is pretty horrifying - but then at about the halfway point the terror of mob mentality began to show through - the idea of a town allowing three of its teenagers to be publicly whipped and those who weren't onboard feeling like they had to be onboard or face a similar fate is almost as bad. The atmosphere in the town reminded me of Nazi Germany (I'm also reading Schindler's Ark at the moment) or Stalinist Soviet Union with the constant surveillance and the way neighbour was encouraged to dob in neighbour to further keep control of the town. Sure, it started out as a protective measure for the townspeople's own good, but as soon as there was a problem it quickly deteriorated into chaos.

BIG SPOILER TO FOLLOW

I liked the geographical move that happened with the translation into English. Reading Heuvelt's explanation on his blog really made me think that the story and the horror would have been lost in translation if he hadn't rewritten it for English speaking audiences. The one thing I would like to know is how the original book ended, because this ending was a pretty bleak 'no one survives' kind of ending (not that I didn't enjoy that, I would just be interested to see how he wrote it the first time around).