Thomas Olde Heuvelt isn’t just a rising name in horror; he’s already on the shelf of international bestsellers. The Dutch author of HEX (a global breakout translated into dozens of languages) has won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, earned multiple Dutch Paul Harland Prizes, and picked up additional Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominations along the way.
Heuvelt also works bilingually, collaborating closely with translator Lia Belt and then rewriting his English editions himself, a more rare and meticulous process that sharpens voice and pacing for a global audience.
With his latest novel, Darker Days, surging across North America, we had the chance to ask Thomas Olde Heuvelt some questions that begin in craft and drift toward the terrible math of comfort. Step into the mind of Thomas Olde Heuvelt, if you dare.
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The characters in Darker Days are us, as we all partake in some sacrifice for our own happiness, and you wanted to make people think. What is one action that you would want people to take after reading Darker Days and thinking about the story?
Yes, Darker Days is about the sacrifices we all make in the pursuit of our happiness. We all fly, even when we know it wrecks the planet. We turn up our air conditioning while polar bears cling to the last patches of ice. We want cheap clothes and cheap food, but we know someone, somewhere, is paying the price. We all make such sacrifices—I do, too.
So my goal is not to judge. I just want to make you think about the price we pay. Because really… is one annual human sacrifice so much worse than what we all pay on a daily basis? The creepy part of Darker Days is that it makes you wonder on each page if you could go along with what the characters are doing… and discover that the answer might be yes.
You mentioned having to cut around 30k words in the translation, what do you wish you could have kept?
I didn’t have to, I chose to. As an author, you rarely get the chance to make a book better for an entirely new audience, after it’s been published. I am a bit of an exception here. I originally write my novels in Dutch. But I work closely together with my English translator Lia Belt, who is amazing. I rewrite her translation, I basically do a second version of it.
Reading my book in a different language creates enough distance that I can see all sorts of things from a different perspective than when I first wrote it. So I do all sorts of little fixes. Tightening up the language, paragraphs, scenes, that sort of thing. Also, English generally uses less words to express things than Dutch does. A good, loyal translation should be about ten percent shorter to begin with. And then I come in and chop away.
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Why November? What is it about November that made you focus on this month in particular in Darker Days?
I mean, we all hate November, don’t we? November is when everything dies. December is fun, we light up the trees, Christmas is around the corner, but November? The leaves fall from the trees. We still remember what has been, but now it’s just cold and nasty and wet and dark, like gutters and wells and trenches and woodlands. Of course, November is when the devil is due.
In the context of what Darker Days explores, when push comes to shove (like in a certain scene in the middle of the book), do you think people will generally make the right choice? If not, why?
I want to believe people are generally good. We want to do the right thing. Most of us, at least (let’s not talk about billionaires in positions of power, here). What interests me is not bad people, but good people being forced, or slowly being pushed toward, bad acts. That’s the real scary part of life. Because it begs the question: would we all be capable of horrors, acts of violence, if indeed, push comes to shove?
Most of the characters in Darker Days aren’t bad people (some are). They generally believe they’re doing the right thing. And in their position, maybe that’s even true. The book shows how dangerous that can be when our own ethical judgement lapses.
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You mentioned in your bio that your childhood was a string of nightmares that you would exorcise through your stories. What nightmares are you exorcising next?
Definitely. My dad died when I was young and Death was an active presence in our house. I imagined it living in our attic. I was death scared of it, but also fascinated—because what scares us, also fascinates us. My uncle sensed this, and started telling me stories where kids beat their monsters, defied death. He told me the good stuff—it started with Roald Dahl’s The Witches, but soon escalated into Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the likes (I was 8 at the time).
That’s how I learned how I could use stories to beat my own fears. I wrote a new novel about this. It’s a very personal one, titled The Last Story of Jamie Gunn. It’s about a boy who loses his father and discovers a story that kills you when you hear its ending. It’s fucking scary. This week it was published in The Netherlands, and I already hear messages from readers that it terrified them. It will make its way overseas next.
We want to say a big thank you to Thomas Olde Heuvelt for his time, for the chills, and his very personal answers. Darker Days is already resonating with North American readers, and his next project, The Last Story of Jamie Gunn, sounds like it will haunt the quiet hours, too. We cannot wait to get our hands on it!
