“Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.” So begins the creepy cover copy for Hex, a novel of the modern fantastic from Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt. A best-seller in its native Netherlands, the book recently appeared in English translation.

The “here” in question is a hamlet in New York’s Hudson Valley, haunted and isolated for centuries by the ghost of a witch who has a disturbing habit of standing at children’s bedsides, her eyes and mouth sewn shut.

That’s just one of the "Mid-Summer Nightmares” that Bear Pond Books in Montpelier will present on Tuesday, July 12, at 7 p.m. (More info here.) Olde Heuvelt will read from his work — his only Vermont stop on a national tour — along with three other authors of dark fiction, two of them local.



Daniel Mills of Hinesburg is a writer of atmospheric, old-school gothics, often with richly detailed historical settings: We wrote about his short-story collection The Lord Came at Twilight here and his novel Revenants: A Dream of New England here. His latest is a short novel told in the form of 19th-century diary entries: The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile.

Burlington’s Kristin Dearborn is the author of several small-press horror novels and shorter fictions, including the recent release Stolen Away.

The fourth guest is Boston-based Paul Tremblay, whose novel A Head Full of Ghosts “scared the living hell out of” Stephen King, by the horror meister’s own admission. His latest is Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, in which a teenager’s vanishing at a local landmark turns out to have terrifying, potentially supernatural ramifications.

If your idea of a beach book involves sophisticated shivers, it appears you'll have plenty to read this summer. Just watch out for those nightmares.