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The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

Meet the Jolly Boys—five men from northern Wisconsin who built a deer hunting shack in 1955 and established a tradition that has now lasted over six decades. Hunting Camp 52, affectionately known as Blue Heaven, is a place where every trail, rock, and ravine has its own nickname; every kill is recorded by hand on a window shade; every hunter happily croons along during evening songfests; and every rowdy poker game lasts late into the night. The outhouse is always cold, the porcupines are always a problem, and the vehicles are always getting stuck in the mud, but there’s nowhere else these men would rather be.

In Hunting Camp 52: Tales from a North Woods Deer Camp, John Marvin Hanson—the son of one of the original Jolly Boys—recounts the sidesplitting antics, the memorable hunts, and the profound camaraderie that has developed over almost sixty seasons at Blue Heaven. Hanson also includes more than twenty recipes for gourmet comfort foods prepared each year at camp, from pickled venison hearts to Norwegian meatballs to the treasured recipe for Reali Spaghetti. As the Jolly Boys age and younger generations take up the mantle of Blue Heaven, Hanson comes to appreciate that hunting camp is not about bagging a trophy buck as much as it is about spending time with the friends and family members who matter most.