If it sounds incestuous, claustrophobic and messy – it is. Despite its botanical backdrop, the novel spends most of its time focusing on these tangled relationships, and the webs of desire between them are just about as toxic as the seeds germinating in Nell’s apartment. Nell and Joan are caught up in not so much a love triangle as a love hexagon: there’s Nell’s medievalist ex-boyfriend Tom her glamorous best friend Mishti Mishti’s boyfriend Carlo and Joan’s creepy husband Barry. Joan Kallas, the lecturer she’s in love with. While she tries to engineer an antidote, she’s also writing a series of obsessive journals dedicated to ‘you’ – Dr. Derailed, depressed and desperate, Nell steals the killer seeds to continue the work from a grim apartment in Red Hook. It follows the main character Nell, a PhD candidate in biological science, who’s expelled from Columbia after her labmate dies in an accident with plant toxins. Hex is a dark, uneasy novel about poison and desire.
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