Hex

“Sure enough, standing in the odd corner between the couch and the fireplace […] was a small, shrunken woman, skinny as a rail and utterly motionless. She looked like something that didn’t belong in the clear golden light of the afternoon: dark, dirty, nocturnal. Jocelyn had hung an old dishcloth over her head so you couldn’t see her face.”

This quote establishes the novel’s central embodiment of horror by juxtaposing the supernatural with the mundane. The narrative contrasts the “clear golden light” of a modern home with Katherine’s “dark, dirty, nocturnal” presence, which visualizes the intrusion of an ancient curse into contemporary domestic life. Placing a dishcloth over the ghost’s head is a futile and faintly comical gesture of control, symbolizing the community’s attempts to domesticate an unknowable terror and linking to the eyes and sight motif through a literal act of willed ignorance.

“Apartheid is an underrated system, Grim thought. […] a revolutionary and disturbingly altruistic part of him saw the world as divided into people from Black Spring and people outside Black Spring. Preferably with lots of rusty barbed wire in between.”

Robert Grim’s internal monologue reveals the extreme ideology born from the town’s fear of the witch. Though tongue-in-cheek, the comparison to apartheid, a system of violent segregation, illustrates the theme of The Tyranny of Fear and the Erosion of Humanity. Grim’s thought process demonstrates how the town’s self-imposed quarantine has fostered an insular worldview, yet this insularity inverts the dynamics of xenophobia. Grim is “altruistic” in attempting to prevent outsiders from subjecting themselves to all that life in Black Spring entails, including the community’s ruthless self-policing. In other words, the “apartheid” system Grim envisions is one in which the “oppressed” oppress themselves,