5.0 out of 5 stars
Complex, Tense Journey to Hell and Back
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 27, 2023
The follow-up to Ninth House, Hell Bent tells the story of Alex Stern’s determination to restore the Virgil to her Dante at Lethe. Lethe is ninth house introduced in the first novel, the oversight house at Yale University, where long standing tradition means that eight powerful houses, or societies, use the arcane and magic to alter reality or prognosticate or otherwise guarantee their alumni continue to live lives of privilege and prosperity. Lethe observes their rituals and workings to keep them both unobserved by outside eyes, and also undisturbed by the occult, any ghostly forces that would interrupt or play havoc with the magic integral to the ceremonies and rites being conducted in secret by these eight houses inside Yale University’s venerable tombs and classroom buildings.
Alex Stern’s mentor at Lethe,Daniel Arlington, is sucked through a portal of some kind in the middle of the first book. With the assistance of Lethe’s Oculus, Pam Dawes, Alex is determined to rescue Darlington and bring him home. The circumstances surrounding this random accident are suspicious and Alex isn’t having it. Working against this goal are many obstacles, ranging from past to present. There’s blowback from Alex’s lurid and unsettling past as a strung-out teen in California; there’s the distrust and resistance Alex and Dawes encounter from the adults in the Lethe organization, from the Lethe-liaison police detective with whom they worked to solve a murder in book one, Ninth House, to the faculty and university administrators within whose imprimatur they must work, who discourage investigation and sadly shake their heads and write off a young man’s loss—his assumed death—as an unfortunate hazard of the job.
Determined as Alex and the reluctant team of other characters who join the quest are to bring Darlington home, their objective becomes enormously daunting, nearly unthinkable, when it becomes clear that they must steal back Darlington’s soul from hell itself, and that they won’t be the first Yale students to make the trip to the underworld and back. What price will they pay to save Darlington, Lethe’s “golden boy” who was intentionally sucked into the demonic realm? The action is fast-paced, urgent, and suspenseful. It cost me as a reader to go slowly, to savor the story instead of devour it. This novel builds a rich and layered world with a strong central narrative objective (getting Darlington’s soul back) which is further enriched by all sorts of extraneous and intertwined complications:
—like the reappearance of Eitan, the West Coast Israeli drug kingpin who ensures Alex’s compliance in working for him by obliquely threatening her mom’s well-being;
—like Alex’s realization that the spirits of the dead, the Grays she’s always seen, can speak to and through her and can even momentarily hijack her body to talk to living people;
—like the fact that human souls can be ripped out of bodies, and a such a body can return to the regular world, sans soul, to hang out in a warded circle in his childhood home, naked, beautiful, bearing glowing golden badges of demonic indenture, featuring horns, and a robust erection;
—like the fact that vampires actually exist(!);
and
—like the inclusion of Alex’s roommate, Mercy, who has not hitherto been aware of the magic suffused into the fabric of her university, into the elaborate Darlington rescue plan— all these twists and turns, make the story both more relatable—life throws complications at us constantly, even when we are in the midst of Big Things—and also more complex, lending the book the wonderful, fully-developed richness that readers so love and expect from Leigh Bardugo’s novels.
This second Alex Stern novel is an easier read than Ninth House, I thought, because the time line is relatively straightforward. I reread Ninth House before launching into Hell Bent (I often reread a novel before I read its sequel), and I was once again struck by Leigh Bardugo’s use of a wildly fractured narrative time line. The reader has to piece together what has occurred to get to Alex’s enrollment at Yale, then figure out Daniel’s a sense and what caused it, and how the past has shaped him almost as much as Alex’s has shaped her. Reading it feels disjointed, complicated, disassociated, something like being in a fugue state—like waking up on a stained mattress and not knowing how one’s best friend could be no longer alive, or how the room around one became splintered and wrong and littered with the blood-splattered remains of people one knew, all while one was apparently unconscious.
I loved this novel, its predecessor, and I am eager to find out what happens next, though the wait for book three will no doubt be agonizing. I recommend this novel—and this author—wholeheartedly. Hell Bent is 100% great read.
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