My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Received: ARC
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Point of View: Third Person (Alex and some other sparsely interspersed)
Genres & Themes: Fiction, Adult, Fantasy
BLURB:
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.
REVIEW:
“Death isn’t just a place you visit.”
We’re going straight to hell, and we’re saving Darlington if it’s the last thing we do.
Every time Leigh Bardugo announced a project that wasn’t the Ninth House sequel Darlington went deeper into hell and his demon-human self. If I wanted something from Ninth House’s eulogy on Yale’s architecture and the societies, it was for Alex and Dawes to bring Darlington back from hell.
Whatever the cost may be.
Because there will be a cost, but Lethe House and the world could burn for Darlington’s sake.
For a character who had considerably less page time than some of the other characters, Darlington is a character that holds a presence to him far after you finish reading Ninth House. Though there are 546 mentions of him in Hell Bent, he’s still a character that warrants intrigue and magnetism.
“She knew her connection to the dead had been deepened by what she’d had to do in her fight with Belbalm. She’d called them to her and offered them her name. They’d answered. They’d saved her. And of course, the rescue had come at a price. All her life, she’d been able to see Grays; now she could hear them too. They were that much closer, that much harder to ignore. But maybe she hadn’t really understood what salvation would cost her at all. Something very bad had happened in Oddman’s house, something she couldn’t explain. She was meant to control the dead, to use them. Not the other way around.”
The aftermath of Ninth House has Alex and Dawes in different directions but closer than ever. Alex has settled into her role of Dante somewhat, starting a new semester but having been pulled back into her past during the summer, and trying to find a gateway to hell. Likewise, Dawes is researching for any rituals that could open the portal.
As they’re attempting to break in and rescue a human maybe turned Demon Darlington, new bodies are dropping from Yale. Turner turns to Alex for help with the bizarre deaths, and in turn, Alex will ask for one hell of an ask.
Ninth House and Alex didn’t deeply resonate with me. The drawn-out and over-explained Yale and the societies; the feeling that Bardugo was more enamored with the architecture and somewhat history hindered the flow of the story and it turned slowed it down to moments of action, left me somewhat apprehensive for this sequel. Yet I went into this installment just for more glimpses of Darlington and hoping it was building into a narrative closer to an exploration of privilege and power in the Ivy Leagues and what it would mean for the mystical to be mixed in that. How the elite and the powerful would further abuse the knowledge and the power, and perhaps how this group would dismantle or at least challenge that.
“This is what your magic is for, isn’t it? This is what it does. Props up the people in power, let’s the people with everything take a little more?”
So going into Hell Bent I was expecting the same descriptive writing that seemed more focused on the location, and creating an ambiance of academia rather than magic and a driving force of action for a heist made in hell. Or rather a hell heist.
The setup is simple. A heist to break out someone from hell. They have magic after all. Hell, Alex can see, talk and use the dead. They have lethe’s resources and the beginnings of a plan. Except for no plan ever goes accordingly.
I’ll say that Hell Bent moved a bit faster narrative-wise, and did was it was supposed to do. It showed us the aftermath of all that transpired in Ninth House, how the deaths and the murderer affected their standing in Lethe and Yale; what it meant that Alex could use and be used by the dead; how the past would come back to haunt Alex in more ways that one and just exactly who would come back. More history, more magic, more chaos, more things going awry when it comes to Alex, and more deaths (when it comes to Alex).
As for Darlington, well—let’s give them hell, Darlington…
“Darlington was. He’d go to hell for me, for you, for anyone who needed saving.”
“Alex,” Michelle said, dusting off her skirt, “he’d go to hell just to take notes on the climate.”
As a continuation, Darlington keeps on giving an endless source of intrigue. As this is a series set up for 5 installments, I would really love for Bardugo to explore and challenge a character like Darlington fully. Darlington, who in his loneliness, chose to believe in magic and the occult and threw himself into it without regard for his life. It then ends up being the thing that crushes and swallows him, consumes him, and doesn’t want to let him go. Darlington once felt this envy for Alex’s gift, since she got to be a part of the magic, to be magic, in a way.
In Hell Bent, there’s that balance of history, occult & magic, of more, deaths and who is murdering and why, and it all ties to history, and creating a team out of those who have murdered and those that can tie them back to the living.
By the end of this book, they’ll all be irrevocably tied and bonded by having seen each other at their worst and their weakest. At knowing each other in a way they would have never allowed themselves seen unless they had to journey to hell.
Hell Bent has those elements we’ve experienced in Bardugo’s earlier and younger writing. Found family based on trauma and tragedy, the family you find that will go to hell and back for you when they offer you the security you’ve never encountered before. Even from those characters that do it rather begrudgingly, but that morally could never let you go to hell alone.
Slowly, we see changes in positions, alliances, bonds, and connections. Where once Alex was the newcomer, there are people who only know her as Virgil, not Darlington’s Dante. She’s finding her footing at Yale and Lethe and has found a home in Black Elm and Cosmo. Those around her coming to her for help.
But she’d wanted to believe that Darlington would be okay, that whatever he’d endured in hell wouldn’t leave a mark, that she could be forgiven and order restored. He would be made whole and she alongside him.
One of my favorite narratives to explore ( because I love and hate it equally) is when a character either goes away (willingly or unwillingly) and the others stay behind and when they come back everything has changed. It’s heartbreaking for everyone involved, especially in this case. To have been taken unwittingly to a place that tortured you mentally and physically, and to then come back not yourself. Changed. And then to a world that accommodated itself around your absence. The places you occupied before having been filled, your space in the world having been filled.
“Whatever survived in hell wouldn’t be the Darlington you know.”
Alex is a character that might take a while for readers to warm up and like—and she knows this. She’s someone who throws herself into danger, not fearing for her life. She’s a survivor and she’ll keep trying and fighting, but now she has someone she’s fighting for…
“Alex was the real thing. She’d taken a bat to Len, to Ariel, to all the rest, and she’d never lost a minute of sleep over the things she’d done.”
By the end of Hell Bent, I was pulled into the mystery and Alex Stern’s draw a bit more. One thing I wish Bardugo would steer away from and would instead show us is why Stern is so valuable. Why her? Narratives always go the same way, and I wish it isn’t the case with Alex. I would rather have Darlington be the one because at least he’d do something. He would explore it to its infinite, and really challenge its meaning.
“They would have gone on without me. They would have grown stronger. Sitting there, watching them hatch their plans with Turner and Mercy, he’d felt like a stranger in a place he’d once known he belonged.”
I’m honestly tired and I think we should have grown past characters who are special, but they always whine and drag their feet at having been given this special “gift.” I’m really trying to be vague here and not spoil anything.
I’ll be tuned in and sat for the next installment…..Also, as for Darlingstern….things might have gotten complicated.
Also, a certain someone had horns and a glowing……at one point and I just know the things that will be said…
“Hell’s price must be paid.”
