Modern horror that reads like a fast-paced thriller. Picked this up on a whim and really didn't know what to expect. Hex isn't like you typical ghost story, the town residents don't just know about the witch that haunts them, but they go out of their way to keep her a secret from outsiders. As she appears at random around the town they find creative ways to hide her from view. They use surveillance and even have a sort of committee dedicated to dealing with the witch. The witch isn't the town residents only problem though as the town is cursed and no one can leave once they move in. The real scary aspect of the book for me isn't the witch (although granted she is very creepy), it's the evil hidden within humanity and how utterly believable the events of the story are.

This is a wonderfully unique story. Although supernatural, this book bucks the trend of many creepy tales, in that the witch is very much a part of everyday life. The fact that nobody batters an eyelid at the presence of the the Black Rock witch was something that I enjoyed. As the story progresses, things slowly start to unravel, leaving you wondering if a witch is really the thing you should be most frightened of.

OK, I’ll admit it, I was starting to feel in need of a bookish change. As regular visitors to the blog will know, I am an avid crime fiction reader with quite a few psychological thrillers thrown in there for good measure. The books I have read recently have all been brilliant, but I needed something …different. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, I tend turn my attention to horror novels. I had completely forgotten I had this on the TBR! When it was first published in April 2016 I was so excited about it but wasn’t lucky enough to get a copy then. Thankfully the lovely Hodderscape people didn’t leave me waiting too long but by that point, I was deeply immersed in my Summer blog tour reading. Only now am I starting to choose what to read again and this one lept out at my from my Kindle screen. Just to prove how excited I was about this book when it first came out, I downloaded the first 10 chapters from NetGalley and reviewed them on the blog back in February. If you click here you can read that review. See? I was really keen! (In my defence, it was only my second month as a book blogger, I was still refining my art!). As so much time had passed between those first 10 chapters and now I decided to start reading at the very beginning. I was amazed at how easily I remembered the characters and what was going to happen next, testament to a good book. I flew through those first chapters and eagerly anticipated the arrival of chapter 11. So I guess the question is, was it worth the wait? It was. This book somehow managed to garner a strange hold over me. I wasn’t as blown away by the witches antics as I expected to be but that didn’t stop this book being in my thoughts constantly, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep (thankfully it didn’t make it into my dreams!). It has a certain pull. There are some very shocking moments but they are well paced making the build of tension and the imminent sense of foreboding quite exquisite. I read this one slowly, savouring the pictures being painted by the author and enjoying every moment. It’s so very emotional, something I didn’t expect at all. Now that I’ve finished the book and taken a few moments to compose myself, it’s become blatantly clear this is book isn’t really about a witch. It’s about a small community that has to stare death in the face every moment of every day. How they struggle to keep the madness of their predicament at bay and how when the times comes, they turn their backs on everyone else, even their loved ones. I heartily recommend this book. I think it will stay with me for some time and may even be one of the few that I revisit again in the future. Five out of five stars I chose to read and review an ARC of HEX.

I’ve had HEX on my ARC shelf for over a year, waiting patiently and I will admit that I was being a little bit of a wuss, slightly afraid of what I was going to find in those pages! But I finally put on my big girl pants, I manned up and started reading and well, what a bloody brilliant book. Black Spring, to look at, is a normal town in the Hudson Valley, except they are cursed, there is a 300-year-old witch named Katherine, who appears in their homes, walks their streets. Her eyes and mouth are stitched to prevent her from causing chaos. But once someone moves to Black Spring they can never move away. Now, regular readers of this blog will know I tend to flip things on their side, and while I found Katherine immensely creepy (and as someone who suffers with psychosis and sees people who aren’t there, is slightly freaked out that a Katherine is going to appear by the bed now) I felt intensely protective of Katherine as the book progressed. I felt like this was a woman who had been cursed herself and the town wasn’t cursed by her but as a result of what had happened to her. Although Katherine is the focus of the story I felt like the people of the town were where the main story sat. This story was about what happens when there is a kind of marshal law, or even a mob rules. What happens when the laws of the land don’t apply and people go against what is morally right and get carried away with being cruel instead jumping into the idea of an eye for an eye. It’s as though our author has looked at where evil really comes from in these stories. This book gets uncomfortable and hard to read in parts, it doesn’t hold any punches and things happen that made me feel ill but they aren’t going too far, they fit with the story and the situation perfectly. Not once did I feel that things had gone outside the realms of reality. There were subtle references to original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which obviously didn’t end well, in some ways this was like a modern adult version one. It did remind me of them in the way it read. The writing was engaging and between the author being a fluent English speaker and Nancy Forest-Flier who acted as translator for the novel you would never know this had been written in Dutch originally. I can’t recommend this highly enough, a gripping, psychological journey. A huge thanks to Thomas Olde Heuvelt and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC so that I could read and honestly review this novel.

This is a story rewritten from the original Dutch for American audiences, but the Dutch roots show. It's the tale of a witch tortured and killed hundreds of years before, and how she now haunts the town, wandering aimlessly from place to place with her eyes and her mouth sewn shut. It is genuinely creepy and atmospheric, especially when read late at night with the gloomy light of a reading lamp, strongly recommend! (Or not, if you want to sleep :P) I've noticed a lot of vampire or zombie stories floating around, but it's getting kind of hard to find many scary ghost stories. Well, this is a good old fashioned horror about old curses and revenge that keeps you guessing and checking those darkened corners at night. I loved every minute!