Hex – A Chilling Horror Novel with a Well-Thought-Out Premise

“Every last grain of idealism would be sacrificed on the altar of safety.”

Dutch novelist Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex was written and published in the author’s native language in 2013. In 2015, he won the Hugo Award for his novelette ‘The Day the World Turned Upside Down’. Subsequently, the English translation of Hex was taken over by Nancy Forest-Flier and got published in 2016 through Tor Books. Nevertheless, it wasn't a mere translation. Thomas Ode Heuvelt used the opportunity to rewrite some of the portions, and most importantly he changed the Dutch setting and transplanted it to a village in New York State. Although (those who read both versions say) there’s not much difference in terms of premise, Thomas was said to have subtly enhanced his themes in the English version (especially with the ‘revised ending’).

The chief absorbing factor of Hex is its strange setting and how the author slyly amalgamates super-natural goings with the quotidian small-town life (a lot of parallels could be drawn with the eerie premises often cooked up by Stephen King). Hex is set in the remote town of Black Spring, which once bore the name of ‘New Beeck’, back when it was occupied by puritanical Dutch trappers in the 17th century. With a population of roughly 3,000, the 21^st century Black Spring is like any small-town community that's occupied by people of different ethnicity, religion, temperament, etc.  But in one distinct way, Black Spring is not like any other small-town community: the specter of a 17^th century witch haunts the residents. Arms shackled by chains, eyes and mouth sewn shut, the emaciated Black Rock Witch aka Katherine Van Wyler randomly materializes around the town. Katherine -- mother of two children -- tried, tortured and executed for dabbling with witchcraft by the 17^th century settler colony members has kept the denizens under her spell for centuries.

Although the power of Katherine’s doom-invoking spells are curbed by her sewn eyes and mouth, Black Spring people can’t spend more than a week outside the town without experiencing intense suicidal thoughts. Over the decades, attempts to study her have only led to unnecessary loss of lives. Hence, generations of Black Spring residents has preserved the secret about the witch’s existence through a meticulously organized security apparatus, known as HEX. Run by few selected council members, HEX’s duty is to monitor Katherine’s movements 24*7. Since the witch can materialize at any place within the town, the control center also takes pains to avoid the ‘outsiders’ encountering the ghastly specter. And the people of Black Spring has quite used to the witch’s presence despite her frightful appearance (she enters houses at will and sticks around as families eat and sleep). However, Katherine is pretty much like a dormant volcano or a dangerous primitive evil who may breach this sophisticated, high-tech set-up and bring hell upon the small-town. Moreover, few angst-ridden adolescents, in an effort to change the status quo, disregard the respectful distance they must keep from the witch.

Hex heavily draws upon familiar yet potent elements of small-town horror: the atmosphere of conformity, rebellious teenagers, mass hysteria, sinister secrets, etc. The novel largely unfolds from the perspective of Grant family (reader’s entry point into the ‘bewitched’ town). The rapport shared between elder Grants – father Steve, mother Jocelyn—and younger Grants –Tyler and Matt – gradually bestows upon us the details of everyday life in a town subjected to the looming presence of a supernatural phenomenon. The early dinner-table argument between Steve and Tyler, a teenager intolerant of the quarantine imposed by HEX, deftly sets up the novel's themes of parenting, survival, guilt, generational tension, etc. What I particularly liked about Hex is the exciting world-building: from divulging the pragmatic, spontaneous methods of the town’s control center in ‘normalizing’ the witch situation to detailing the dark origin tale of Katherine van Wyler. Thomas has also done well in not turning the witch into a typical phantasmal antagonist. Katherine’s villainy is mostly ambiguous as the flawed populace’s fear and paranoia (that is to say the very human nature) itself activates a set of chaotic events.

I was a bit disappointed with the middle part of the novel. After careful characterization and frightening developments, these portions seemed to ramble. Nevertheless, from the ‘flogging’ scenario, the story flow once again turns genuinely eerie. The bleak climactic events are very well conjured, reinforcing the author’s idea of how sometimes the human nature is as just much threatening and virulent as the malevolent super-natural phenomenon. Overall, Hex is one of the utterly captivating horror novels I have read in recent times (Warner Bros. has purchased the rights for the novel and are apparently in the process of creating a TV series.)

 

Convenience Store Woman – A Wryly Humorous Tale of a Social Misfit

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.”

The society we live in can be so exacting that anyone falling out of the dictated ‘norms’ can get ostracized; their lives like the fluid-preserved specimens would be scrutinized carefully with a hidden disgust. For the 36-year-old narrator, Keiko Furukura in Sayaka Murata’s first English translated novel, Convenience Store Woman (published in 2018 and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), the goal in life seems simple: to be ‘a cog in society’, i.e., ‘a normal person.’ But the prerequisites to conform to the ‘normalcy’ within middle-class life is so tightly controlled that Ms. Furukura’s eccentricities and choices in life dismays people around her. Keiko is somewhere in the autistic spectrum who often ponders over conflicts in practical terms rather than in humanistic terms. She recalls a fight between two unruly boys when she was in primary school. When someone cries out to ‘stop them’, Keiko takes a spade from the nearby shed and bashes one of the boy in the head, bringing the altercation to an abrupt end. Later in life, the adult Keiko visits her younger sister and her newly born nephew. When the baby bawls she steals a glance over to the knife on the table, finding an easy way out of the hassle. Yet Keiko understands that it isn’t appropriate social behavior to act out her ‘practical’ solutions.

Upon leaving college, Keiko takes a part-time job at Smile Mart, the convenience store where the store-workers must jubilantly greet their customers with ‘Irasshaimase!’ Keiko has stayed in the same job for 18-years, finding solace in the mechanical, unemotional space of the convenience store. She mimics her colleagues' speech patterns, their body language, dressing sense, etc. And her self-identity or self-worth is wholly connected with fulfilling the store-set targets and perfectly arranging the products. Keiko has never felt frustrated by the job and she may not comprehend Marx’s theories on work and alienation. She is ‘happy’ to have ‘reborn’ as the convenience store worker. It is only when a new 30-plus temp worker, Shiraha starts working at the store, Keiko thinks about change and the need to ‘normalize’ herself.

The boorish and nearly homeless Shiraha keeps on ranting about ‘Stone Age’; on how the gendered roles in society has never changed since ancient times. His aim in life is to find a wife by working in the store, sponge off her savings in order to start some ‘online business.’ Shiraha is simply a slacker whom Keiko things just one step removed from being a ‘sex-offender’. Nevertheless, she comes to an arrangement with him: he will make her appear “normal”. In return, Shiraha wants her to forgo her store-worker job and take a better job to support him. He will satisfyingly play the role of a boyfriend or husband, which may keep her away from the prying eyes and minds of family & friends. 

Convenience Store Woman is less of a social critique on exploitation of low-wage labors or dehumanizing capitalist system, and more of a keenly observant study of a woman with an unorthodox lifestyle. While author Murata asks us to accept and respect the woman’s very simple choice in life, she also skillfully illustrates the absurdities of modern life. Keiko leads a contented life in her own way, but the society wants her to keep on conforming to traditional expectations even though it means going through the same cycle of problems and being unhappy. Written in lucid prose, Murata does well in depicting the store’s setting – its inner-workings, mechanized work-flow, sounds of bar-code scanners and door chimes, etc -- which serves as the predominant link to her heroine’s existence. The author also excels in providing insight about a introverted character’s thoughts, who in reality doesn’t allow others to perceive what’s going insider her mind. At the same time, the slim novel does get a bit repetitive, especially with Shiraha’s non-stop rants. Moreover, since there’s not much of a character trajectory for Keiko, some parts in the second-half of the story felt vacuous.

 

The Star Diaries – Crazily Imaginative Short Stories from the Masterful Sci-fi Satirist

“…..Notwithstanding all the hardship and pain it had occasioned me, I was glad of the outcome, since it restored my faith, shaken by corrupt cosmic officeholders, in the natural decency of electronic brains. Yes, it’s comforting to know when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard.”

Polish author Stanislaw Lem is best known for his philosophical first-contact story Solaris (1961). But Mr. Lem proved himself to be more than an utterly serious author of sci-fi (think, Arthur C. Clarke) through his satirical and profound stories, following the cosmic (mis)adventures of Ijon Tichy (the elaborately constructed puns also reminds us of Kurt Vonnegut’s works). The Star Diaries, Lem’s most substantial work(translated by Michael Kandel and published in English in 1976), is the first collection of short stories featuring the obstinate, 23^rd century space explorer, whose intergalactic trips in his rundown rocket brilliantly satirizes society, technology, and human condition (strongly recommended for ‘Rick and Morty’ fans). The book sets up its central conceit in the two separate introductions: that it’s an incomplete recollection of Ijon Tichy’s travels. The diary is allegedly edited by Tarantoga, a professor of Astrozoology and connoisseur of ‘Tichology’. He apologizes for the incompleteness of the diary entries chronicling Tichy’s voyages. This comic introduction perfectly foretells the wacky, free-wheeling tone of each upcoming parables.

On why the diary entries start with seventh voyage and some of the voyages are entirely missing, Tichy says, “…some of the journeys took place in space, and some in time, therefore there can never be a first; you could always go back to when there were none and set out somewhere; then the one that had been first would become the second, and so on, ad infinitum!” Moreover, this specific ordering of the stories in the expanded edition was not done according to the order in which they were written (Lem deliberately concealed the chronological order of his writing). Hence, we can find certain shift in the tone of Tichy’s subsequent adventures, i.e., in Lem’s writing, as he veers from goofy anecdotal stories to satires on Stalinism to profound ruminations on human nature. Lem opens the book with a playful time-travel story, where Tichy’s spaceship travels through a series of time vortices, leading to the creation of multiple copies of himself. However in the book’s biggest story (‘The Twenty-first Voyage’), featuring the oppressed robot monks of a planet called Dichotica, the zippy feel is wholly replaced by somber and deep discussions on religion and faith (“The vision of heaven as a bank account and hell as a debtor’s prison represents a momentary aberration in the history of the faith. Theodicy is not a course in sophistry to train defenders of the Good Lord, and faith doesn’t mean telling people that everything will work out in the end”, contemplates a transhuman prior).

Elsewhere, Lem sharply satirizes Stalinism in couple of stories – The Eleventh and Thirteenth Voyages. In one story, Tichy sets out to the planet of Circia that’s governed by a rogue computer and populated by human-hating robots. In the other story, Tichy lands on the planets of Pinta and Panta which is following the principles of Master Oh, the greatest sage in all of Cosmos. In Pinta, people are desperately trying to live underwater, whereas in Panta, the government has taken extreme measures to abolish individuality. Both these stories amply refer to paranoia, conformity, and persecutions in the Stalinist era (“The upshot was... that what was to be controlled, controlled us”.) The Eighth and the exhaustively detailed Twentieth voyage poke fun at human nature. The Twentieth Voyage of Tichy happens to be another time-travel yarn, in which the explorer is appointed as the chief of a secret programme that’s engaged in amending Earth and human history. Of course, the staggering human mistakes ruins everything, causing Tichy to exile the programme’s violators like Homer, Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci to different centuries in the past, who having ‘deprived of the opportunity to create real things, gave vent to their frustrations in vicarious, sublimated work’.

Lem expertly interleaves weighty stories with playful ones. For instance, the tale of Dichotica civilization is followed up with darkly humorous account of troubles faced by a priest evangelizing extraterrestrial civilizations. Then there’s the tale of a sentient spaceship-attacking 'potatoes' and the description about inhabitants of a tiny planet who economize living space by frequently reducing themselves to 'atomic dust'. What I find interesting about Lem’s perception of human follies is that he doesn’t present a decidedly dystopian vision, but a seemingly utopian vision to meditate on human limitations. Be it the evolution by ‘persuasion’ in the planet of Pinta or Dichoticans achieving corporeal and mental plasticity, Lem envisions how intelligent beings screw up things. In one case, a semblance of utopia is reached as the power structure cruelly twists people's perception of their surroundings, and in the other case, people despite having unbridled access to science & technology to self-enhance themselves (in myriad ways) still feel entrapped. Through these weirdly inventive creations, Lem pushes us to constantly think about the limits of freedom and nature of individuality, and for which parallels could be found in our own history. Overall, The Star Diaries is an alternatively joyful and thought-provoking collection of sci-fi short stories which ponders over humanity through truly bizarre concoctions.