The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.
Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.
Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.
Hex is playful and self-reflective, mixing contemporary culture with folklore. ... An unabashedly fantastical tale, Hex is a pleasure.'
—Foreword Reviews
'Sarah Addison Allen for sophisticates, with touches of Louise Erdrich and Alice Hoffman.'
—Library Journal
Sarah Blackman's power is so intimate, so precise. Hex is an enchantment, a suspension between the vital heat of the body and the cold structure of story, its deliberate telling. Hex is a map to the realm of the most contemporary fiction—its keen sense of genre, its investigation of the fable, the tale, the ancient needed weirding of narrative. Blackman is a writer I will be reading for decades, a writer who will keep teaching me what it is to read.'
—Hillary Plum, author of They Dragged Them through the Streets
'Hex is a tessellation of diamond-cut tales, a cruelly perfect work of narrative geometry that somehow beats with a human heart. Sarah Blackman animates the crystal lattice of this book, gives it dragon wings and a beetle shell and the unblinking eyes of a motherless girl who sees through flint and clay to the world beneath the world. Hex is a great and terrible gift.'
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith
Sarah Blackman is the director of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, a magnet arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina, and a fiction editor at Diagram. Her debut collection of short fiction, Mother Box and Other Tales, won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2012.
