Author Amy Jane Stewart’s debut novel, Hex House, a feminist horror fairy-tale, arrives tomorrow, April 28, via Titan Books. A writer of the speculative and strange, Stewart has already garnered significant acclaim, having been shortlisted for or won several honors, including the Northern Writers’ Award and the Mairtín Crawford Award.
Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, A. G Slatter and Julia Armfield, Hex House is a dark, unsettling Scotland-set fairy-tale centred on a refuge for women that ultimately transforms them into vessels of revenge. The story follows Elly, who flees her husband on their wedding night, pregnant and still in her dress, fearing the violence he may one day inflict. She stumbles across Hex House, a hidden place that appears only to women in crisis and offers access to a transformative, and potentially dangerous, power. Years later in Edinburgh, Siobhan, a former documentary filmmaker who was once given the privilege of accessing Hex House, tries to suppress what she witnessed there, but cannot shake its influence, inevitably drawn back to it.
For this writer, Hex House reads like a grounded Grimm fairy-tale, but with the fantasy never overshadowing its emotional core. Stewart paints her characters with candid honesty, showing them as complex, fallible people rather than neat heroes or villains, thereby dragging the reader’s moral compass through the wringer and testing any preconceived notions of right, wrong, or clear sides. Seamlessly weaving past and present, the story remains taut and compelling throughout, revealing hidden layers that culminate in hard-won voice, strength, and self-realisation.
To mark the book’s release, CinemaChords sat down with Stewart to discuss how Hex House reveals itself at moments of emotional breaking point, its Grimm fairytale echoes and how she balances that mythic structure with contemporary emotional realism, and how the book dissects fear and transformation, with its fantastical elements intersecting with the grounded psychology of trauma and recovery.
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