There are many works out there where part way through reading one can already write a review given the trajectory is visible so early and the pages ahead are merely the unfolding of an inevitable destiny. Amy Jane Stewart’s debut novel is not one of those works. At all times, the path ahead is as twisted and thick with thorns as the woods surrounding Hex House.
Two entangled tales weave around one another and bind tighter chapter by chapter: one the story of Elly, a newlywed bride on the run; two, Siobhan, a former documentary maker now in such turmoil that she has spent years hiding. Rather than the book’s throat-constricting tension lessening as we learn more of what has transpired, it only grows because the protagonists’ emotional state works continuously at one’s nerves. For Elly and Siobhan, every moment of existence is laced with anxiety, an unending apprehension that works its way ever deeper into the reader as these two souls simultaneously make, regret, reconsider and swallow each choice, always uncertain whether they ever had any choice at all.
While the book’s title draws one’s focus to Hex House, Stewart’s gift and the strength of the story is not location but character. Even when it comes to minor characters, Margot or Sylvie for example, the novel refuses to reduce them to either basic archetypes or helpful NPCs existing merely for scenery or to nudge our heroes along. Instead, they speak and act within their own worlds of unseen needs and motives, interacting with the plot rather than popping up just to give it a convenient push, meaning they retain their potential to set it on previously hidden paths.
This extends to what could, in less skilled hands, so easily be the villains of the piece. First, there’s Ethan, a man with sufficient surface charisma that it seems family members, friends and colleagues would all say he’s ‘a good bloke’. Even his terrified wife, someone scorched by his white-hot need for psychological control, who knows his potential for physical violence is simmering only just below the surface, is left conflicted as if the issue with him is as likely to be something wrong with her. There’s nothing here so unworldly or ridiculous as unadulterated evil; the ambiguity is what makes it brutally realistic and all the more terrifying for it.
It’s the same with the man in Siobhan’s life, Owen. On a train a year back, I overheard two students discussing a flirtatious male friend and was delighted to hear one refer to him as ‘eco-cock’; she then explained that he exaggerated his interest in environmental causes as a dating tactic to ring-fence a particular circle of targets and to lower their guard. That description sprang to mind when contemplating Owen with his relentless determination to show that he’s listening, respecting space, allowing for female agency. Stewart refuses to make it simple by answering whether this is merely a form of catfishing with Owen making whatever performance of enlightened masculinity he needs to in service of the same ol’, same ol’ age-long hungers. He’s ‘real’ in that he isn’t a fully explicated fake; he’s a figure with his own internal world we cannot glimpse, seen only through the eyes of an untrustworthy narrator, leaving us unable to pulverise that uncertainty as to his nature.
That uncertainty serves to heighten the queasiness involved as we observe Siobhan’s treatment of Owen, the games she plays with a man we cannot say is saint or sinner. However, the genius of this book, a key driver of its fearsome nature, is that women too are allowed to be untidy and imperfect in ways that they are often not permitted.
In Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, a character describes the aftermath of a gun battle, saying: “So, I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle, and I’ve been there ever since.” Siobhan is in a state of such fear-shredded desiccation that alcoholism is her final defensive stockade, one she maintains in full fatalistic knowledge that it is sinking her body and her mind deeper and deeper into a fatal degradation measured in lost time, unwashed bedding, formal work warnings, and filthy dishes.
While Siobhan pinballs between emotional states — in some ways similar to Ethan in her need for control and her potential to cause harm — Elly is kind, self-critical, and stuck with the false belief that she needs to be a mere satellite circling the sun of someone else’s desires. Elly finds Hex House and is offered the possibility of transformation which, in this telling, is nothing like the gentleness of yoga circles, forest meditation and other middle-class indulgences. In this novel, to find completeness, to be truly oneself, requires a visceral transmogrification, one that does not even guarantee survival in this world.
At the centre of the web is Haina, the kind of female authority celebrated — selectively — by corporations and in ghostwritten self-help books advocating a particular form of empowerment. Haina draws the injured, those in pain, to Hex House, offering them sanctuary and opportunity, but there’s always risk, always a price in this life. Haina is magnificent, the kind of aristocratic presence who conjures with the threads of all the lives around her.
Stewart has crafted a fine story, made doubly horrific in the way it makes the basic indignities, stresses and awfulness of real lives pulse with foreboding, while refusing us the comfort of a perfect heroine to root for. Like the walls of Hex House, nothing is steady, nothing is stable.
WRITER
Amy Jane Stewart
PUBLISHER
Titan
RELEASE
28 April 2026
