“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.

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Margot Harrison is a consulting editor and film critic at Seven Days. Her film reviews appear every week in the paper and online. In 2024, she won the Jim Ridley Award for arts criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. Her book reviews...