Leigh Bardugo Dragged Alex Stern to Hell and I Followed

Yale Never Looked So Much Like Hell

Here’s where we left off, roughly: Alex Stern, the girl who sees ghosts (Grays, if we’re being precise) and got recruited into Yale’s secret societies because of it, watched her mentor Darlington get pulled into a hell-portal at the end of Ninth House. Everyone told her he was dead. Everyone was wrong, or at least Alex refuses to believe they’re right, which is basically the same thing when you’re as stubborn as she is.

So Hell Bent opens with Alex doing something no sane person does: she decides to go get him back. From Hell. Actual Hell, not a metaphor, not a fun goth turn of phrase. She needs to pull off a resurrection that isn’t supposed to be possible, using magic that isn’t supposed to exist, with the help of a ragtag crew that includes Dawes (still my favorite, still criminally underused), Turner (a cop who’s seen too much to pretend he hasn’t), and Mercy, who got dragged into all this in book one and is now stuck being the only reasonably normal person in a room full of magicians and murderers.

Bardugo does something structurally gutsy here. Half the book is Alex in the present, scheming her way toward an impossible rescue. The other half is Darlington’s perspective from inside Hell itself, and it’s not the fire-and-brimstone theme park you’d expect. It’s colder than that. Stranger. It’s Hell as bureaucracy, Hell as a place with its own rules that punish you specifically for who you are. I won’t spoil what he finds down there, but there’s a version of his own house, his own family, waiting for him, and it broke something in me a little.

The Part Where I Have to Be Honest

Okay. Here’s the thing. The middle third of this book drags. I said it. I’ll say it again: it drags. Ninth House had momentum because it had a murder to solve and a body count and Alex’s whole backstory unspooling in flashback like a fuse burning down. Hell Bent has a heist structure instead, and heists need momentum too, need that ticking-clock feeling, and for a stretch in the two hundred page range I found myself putting the book down to do dishes. Which is not something Ninth House ever let me do.

Part of the problem is that Alex’s plan requires so much setup, so many societies and rituals and rules of magic that Bardugo has to explain, that the book occasionally reads like homework before it lets you have the fun. I say this as someone who loves this series enough to be annoyed by it. I wanted to be gripped the whole way through and instead I was patient for a while, trusting Bardugo to pay it off.

And she does pay it off. God, does she pay it off. The last act is where this book earns its rating, where every thread she planted (Turner’s history, the Lethe House rot, the true cost of what Alex is willing to do to save someone) comes together into a finale that had my heart going. There’s a sequence near the end involving a ritual gone sideways that made me actually gasp out loud on a train once, which is embarrassing and also exactly the reaction a book like this should be going for.

What I keep coming back to is how unsentimental Bardugo is about trauma. Alex isn’t a broken girl who gets fixed by love or magic or found family, though she has all three. She’s someone who survived things that should have killed her and turned that survival into a kind of ruthlessness, and Bardugo never asks you to feel comfortable about that. I love her for it. I also wonder sometimes if I’m giving this series more credit than it deserves because I have a weakness for morally messy women who set things on fire, literally and otherwise. Maybe I am. I don’t really care.

Darlington’s Hell chapters are the most ambitious writing in the book and I think some readers bounce off them because they slow the plot even further. I didn’t bounce. I sat with them. There’s something about watching a genuinely good, earnest person get systematically dismantled by a place that knows exactly what he’s afraid of that got under my skin in a way jump scares never do.

The scariest version of Hell isn’t fire. It’s a room that looks exactly like home, except everyone in it hates you for reasons you can’t quite name.

About Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo built an entire fantasy universe, the Grishaverse, before she ever set foot in New Haven, which tells you she was already capable of world-building on a massive scale before she turned her attention to something closer to home: her own alma mater, Yale, reimagined as a place where the secret societies are literally practicing magic. She’s said in interviews that she wanted to write about the parts of elite institutions that get protected no matter what they cost other people, and you can feel that anger underneath every page of this series. She writes like someone who has personally sat in rooms full of privilege and taken very careful mental notes.

If Alex Stern Has You in Its Grip, Read These Next

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt, for the dark academia mood this series is clearly in conversation with, minus the actual magic.
• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, if you want another prickly, morally gray heroine navigating a school that wants her dead.
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, for that same slow, creeping dread that isn’t about jump scares.
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo herself, if you somehow ended up here without reading her Grishaverse and want to see her do a heist plot with more polish and less homework.

For your book club

1. Is Alex’s willingness to go to Hell itself an act of love, guilt, or something more selfish, and does it matter which?
2. What do you make of the version of Hell Bardugo invents, one built from personal history rather than fire and demons?
3. Does the institutional critique (Yale, the societies, who gets protected) land for you, or does it feel secondary to the plot?
4. Did the slower middle section work for you as tension-building, or did it just feel slow?
5. Which secondary character (Dawes, Turner, Mercy) do you wish had gotten more page time, and why?