“A dark, transgressive fairy tale that weaponises feminine rage, Hex House is a stunning, unforgettable debut about what women become when the world offers no safe harbour.”
In our Hex House Review, Amy Jane Stewart’s debut novel arrives when readers crave horror with teeth, stories where the supernatural serves a sharp, feminist purpose. Set against the brooding Scottish landscape, this dark fairy tale of a refuge for abused women explores themes of vengeance, bodily autonomy, and the monstrous potential of survival.
A refuge that becomes a reckoning.
Hex House Review: Amy Jane Stewart’s Dark Fairy Tale of Feminine Revenge
A woman alone in the woods is rarely the beginning. It’s usually the end. That’s the kind of cold, ancestral truth that Hex House whispers in your ear before it even lets you through the door.
Amy Jane Stewart knows this. She writes like someone who has spent time listening to the old stories, the ones that warn you about the forest but never tell you why the trees are so hungry. Her latest novel opens with Elly, pregnant and still in her wedding dress, stumbling through the Scottish night. She has fled a husband whose true nature revealed itself the moment the ceremony ended. And the woods, as they always do in this genre, seem to be closing in. Then a house appears. A house that was not there a moment before. A woman beckons from the doorway.
This is the setup for a familiar kind of fairy tale. The refuge in the wilderness. The coven of women. The promise of safety. Stewart takes these bones and builds something far stranger and more unsettling than the usual Gothic comfort read. Because Hex House is not really a story about a sanctuary. It is a story about what happens when a sanctuary decides to fight back.
Stewart splits the narrative across two timelines. Elly’s arrival at Hex House, that beautiful, impossible building that only appears to those who truly need it, forms the first thread. She finds a community of women who have all suffered at the hands of men, and they offer her a gift. Or perhaps a curse. They teach her to access a power that lives inside her, a power that transforms her from a victim into something that can strike back.
The second thread follows Siobhan, a filmmaker who visited Hex House four years earlier with her brother, Theo, to make a documentary. She left with a scar on her stomach that never heals, a shattered relationship with her brother, and a drinking problem she uses to dull the memories. When someone contacts her with news about the house, she knows she has to go back.
The structure works because it withholds exactly what it needs to. We know something terrible happened at Hex House. We know Siobhan and Theo witnessed it. But Stewart lets the tension build through implication and fractured memory, forcing us to piece together the horror alongside Siobhan’s reluctant return. It is a confident narrative choice, one that trusts the reader to stay patient.
And patience pays off. Because when the full scope of what Hex House does, what it is, becomes clear, the book shifts from a gothic thriller into something far more radical. Stewart is not interested in a simple tale of haunted women finding peace. She is interested in rage. In the mechanics of revenge. In the question of whether a victim can ever truly reclaim power without becoming monstrous themselves.
Reading Stewart’s prose feels like watching a time-lapse of a poisonous flower blooming. The sentences unfurl slowly, deliberately, then burst into something sharp and unexpectedly violent. She has a gift for the kind of description that sticks to you. The Scottish landscape becomes a character in its own right: the cold, the wet, the ancient pressure of the land itself. You can feel the damp creeping under your skin. You can smell the peat smoke. And when the horror arrives, it arrives with a quiet, almost matter-of-fact brutality that feels more disturbing than any jump scare could.
There is a digression I want to make here, about the history of the dark fairy tale. Writers like Angela Carter spent their careers reclaiming these stories from the Brothers Grimm, stripping away the sanitised morals and exposing the raw, often misogynistic bones underneath. Stewart is working in that tradition, but she pushes it further. She asks: what if the fairy godmother were not a benevolent figure but a radical organiser? What if the magic in these women was not a gift from the universe but something they had to pull from their own trauma, their own flesh? Hex House takes the archetype of the women’s refuge and turns it into something actively, terrifyingly militant.
This is where Stewart distinguishes herself from contemporaries like T. Kingfisher, whose horror often finds room for humour and a kind of weary decency. There is no decency in Hex House. There is survival, and there is the cost of survival, and the book does not flinch from showing the ledger. The body horror elements are not gratuitous. They are the point. Stewart wants you to feel the violation these women have endured in your own bones. She wants you to understand that the transformation they undergo is not clean or heroic. It is painful. It is permanent. And it requires sacrifice.
What she builds is a meditation on complicity. On the ways that violence against women is not just interpersonal but structural, a system that the world at large is happy to look away from. Siobhan’s brother, Theo, serves as a fascinating foil. He is not a villain.
He is a well-meaning man who wanted to make a documentary about the house, who believed in its mission, and who still could not quite see what was happening right in front of him. The fracture between the siblings is not just about the horror they witnessed. It is about Theo being able to walk away from Hex House. He could close the door and never look back. Siobhan carries the scar. She cannot.
There is a moment late in the book, when Siobhan finally understands what Hex House was always meant to be, that stopped me cold. It is one of those revelations that reframes everything you have read before, that makes you question whether you were reading the same book as you thought you were. Stewart earned that moment. She laid the groundwork for it, subtly, from the very first page, and when it lands, it lands like a trapdoor opening beneath your feet.
The prose is sharp. The structure is ambitious. The thematic reach is wide. She is writing with the confidence of an author who knows exactly what she wants to say and has found the precise language to say it.
Because the question Hex House asks is not whether Elly will survive. The question is what survival will turn her into. And the answer is not comfortable. It is not clean. It is a question that the book refuses to let you look away from.
You do not leave Hex House. You carry it with you.
Hex House by Amy Jane Stewart
A beautifully told, dark and unsettling fairy-tale about a safe haven for women which transforms them into vessels of revenge, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, A. G Slatter and Julia Armfield
A woman in the woods alone is never the beginning of the story. It’s usually the end.
ELLY
Elly is running. Pregnant and still in her wedding dress, she flees the cottage that her new husband, Ethan, has rented for their wedding night. Because he’s not what people think he is, and she knows that one day he’ll hurt her in a way she can’t fix.
Freezing and alone in the woods in the dead of night, she accepts that she’s going to die. But just as she has given up all hope, a house appears out of nowhere, and a woman beckons her in. Welcome to Hex House. A place that can only be found by those who truly need it. A place that teaches broken women how to access a power more beautiful and more horrifying than anything they could have imagined.
SIOBHAN
Edinburgh, present day: Siobhan’s life is in ruins. Once a promising documentary filmmaker, she has given up on her dream, and kept all the terrifying footage she has of Hex House hidden away. She tries to erase all the horrors she witnessed with drugs and alcohol, and spends her time toying with a man in increasingly feral and dangerous ways. Her brother won’t speak to her, and she ignores the scar on her stomach that never fully heals
But despite everything, always, she feels the presence of that place.
And she knows, deep down, that she has to return.
Amy Jane Stewart
Amy grew up in Edinburgh, but now lives in the beautiful Scottish Borders with her husband and son. Her debut novel, Hex House, is a feminist horror fairy-tale, and will be published in the UK and US by Titan Books in Spring 2026. She is represented by Marilia Savvides at The Plot Agency.
After gaining a BA in English Language and Literature from Newcastle University and an MA in Creative Writing from York St John University, Amy started her PhD with the University of Sheffield in 2020. Her thesis explores the transgressive potential of ‘winged women’, from harpies and angels to circus artists and aviators. In 2023, she was awarded funding from Creative Scotland to complete Hex House.
Her writing tends towards the speculative and strange, and has won or been shortlisted for a number of awards, including a Northern Writers Award and the Mairtín Crawford Award. Visitors are encouraged to check out her writing or get in touch—she would love to hear from them.
