Ignoring the commands from within Lethe to drop it, she continues investigating the Ninth House’s past and looking for a way to open a portal to the underworld and bring Darlington home, despite the fact that doing her actions could see her expelled in the best of circumstances (or bringing about Hell on Earth in the worst ones).
Named the Virgil of Lethe in his place, Alex is charged with monitoring the use of magic by Yale’s famous secret societies, even as she tries to use her new position to serve multiple masters. The story picks up several months after the conclusion of Ninth House, in which Alex’s mentor Darlington was sent to Hell by a now-dead dean.
Because so much of Ninth House was dedicated to Bardugo’s particular brand of plotty worldbuilding, Hell Bent is able to hit the ground running, building on every word of its predecessor’s good work, and catapulting both heroine and readers into a non-stop, tension-filled adventure that takes us from the darkest corner’s of Yale’s history to Hell itself. There is laugh-out-loud humor and genuine horror set alongside the sort of moral quandaries and philosophical questions that should theoretically delight any Ivy League student. Hell Bent is everything fans of Bardugo’s Alex Stern series could have asked for: It’s thematically richer, its characters are more complexly rendered, the darkness lurking at the edges of its New England-set world of privilege is more frightening, and its wit more biting. And…I’m here to tell you it absolutely does-and then some.
It’s been over three years since Ninth House, the first book in bestselling author Leigh Bardugo’s adult dark academia fantasy series based on a scrappy Yale college student with the ability to see the dead hit shelves, so you might be forgiven for wondering if, after so much time has passed, the sequel could possibly live up to the expectations readers undoubtedly had for it.
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