Hex

Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s HEX was first published in Dutch in 2013, set in a small, modern village in the Netherlands. For the 2016 English-language release, Heuvelt chose to completely relocate the story to the United States rather than produce a direct translation, though many elements remain the same. In the Acknowledgments, for example, Heuvelt explains that the original was defined by its “utter Dutchness,” characterized by a down-to-earth response to the supernatural. He notes that if a Dutch person found a witch in his home, he would “[hang] a dishcloth over her face, [sit] on the couch, and [read] the paper” (382). This exact scenario plays out when the Grant family discovers the witch Katherine van Wyler in their living room but is contextualized as a product of the family’s secular worldview—the same thing that Heuvelt identifies as giving the original novel its particularly Dutch flavor.

Heuvelt viewed the adaptation as an opportunity to create a “HEX 2.0,” tailoring the story to a new cultural environment while preserving its core concepts. New York’s Hudson Valley proved an ideal setting due to its own deep Dutch colonial history. This allowed Heuvelt to retain the Dutch origins of the curse; the fictional town of Black Spring is established as a former “Dutch trappers’ colony known as New Beeck” (62). This relocation was more than cosmetic, as Heuvelt also significantly rewrote the novel’s final chapters, making the American version a distinct work. Understanding this authorial process reveals how the Hudson Valley setting was deliberately selected to enhance the novel’s themes of historical trauma clashing with contemporary life in a specifically American context.