


it was only a matter of time before flowers, and poison, and desire featured together in a novel about queer longing. If a spell is language that makes something happen, this one fails to make magic. Despite what the book jacket promises, then, Hex is about as 'spooky' as a creaky door that won’t stop creaking. Some paragraphs begin promisingly, only to end in sentences that make you wish she’d quit while she was ahead. Even consistency is sacrificed for style. The gratuitous descriptions choke.and it can be hard to see the characters through all their quirks.moving about as though with lifeless stage direction and sending up convoluted thought bubbles in their every interaction. The devotional format strains to contain a high volume of bit-part back stories and anecdotal asides that Nell, 'born observant,' records in lieu of scientific data. As it is, the book’s wisest moments read like fortune cookies. Nell might argue that, like a poison and its antidote, such opposites can be more alike than they are different but it would take a better book than Hex to prove it. There’s much that appears self-serious, even as it relishes the twee and bathetic. Meeting the novel on its own terms, then, without expectation, I struggled to gauge what exactly those terms were. I came to Hex, Knight’s second novel, not knowing her previous work.
