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Hell Bent: A Novel (Ninth House Series, 2) Paperback – January 9, 2024
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#1 New York Times Bestseller • Goodreads Choice Award Winner
"A tour de force of suspenseful pacing and empathetic writing." ―The New York Times
"All hail the queen of dark academia!" ―NPR
Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. The Ivy League is going straight to hell in the sequel to the smash New York Times bestseller Ninth House from #1 bestselling author Leigh Bardugo.
A BEST BOOK OF 2023: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookPage, Powell's, and more!!
Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory―even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.
Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.
Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all too real monsters.
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFlatiron Books
- Publication dateJanuary 9, 2024
- Dimensions5.38 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101250859441
- ISBN-13978-1250859440
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Hell Bent
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023 by The New York Times, The Week, Kirkus Reviews, PopSugar, Distractify, Booklist Queen, The Nerd Daily, and more!!
"A tour de force of suspenseful pacing and empathetic writing... The beauty of Hell Bent is that for all the bleakness, the sense of wonder somehow still remains." ―The New York Times
"All hail the queen of dark academia!... Ninth House and Hell Bent may be Bardugo's first books for adults, but you'd never know it, or care, because you're so busy following all of the action... you'll want to capture your copy quickly." ―NPR
"[T]he return of protagonist Alex Stern and her mystical version of the Ivy League is very welcome... Watching this damaged loner bring together a squad of ride-and-die friends is endlessly fun, and Bardugo finds new depths to most of her supporting cast." ―The Washington Post
"Gut-wrenching and deeply human, this book will tug at your heartstrings even as it chills you to the bone.... Standing head and shoulders above the already impressive Ninth House, Hell Bent is one of the best fantasy novels of the year.." ―BookPage (starred reviewed)
"Thrilling ... fascinating supporting players ... The taut plot, often grisly magic, lavish scene-setting, and wry humor combine to make this just as un-put-downable as the first installment. Readers will be wowed." –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Bardugo doesn’t flinch from the dark sides of magic and human nature….This portrait of a survivor’s dogged determination to accomplish her goal will appeal to readers of dark academia, urban fantasy, and horror.” ―Booklist (starred review)
“Vivid, intelligent, and funny at just the right moments, but best of all are the complex characters.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hell Bent is a taut, complexly plotted headrush, stocked full of complicated monsters, entitled academics, and grifters big-time and small." ―Book of the Month
"Hell Bent is just as outrageously good as Ninth House, if not better... This mystery runs on vibes, and the vibes are unparalleled." ―Chicago Review of Books
"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." ―Paste Magazine
"Although Hell Bent is one of my first reads of 2023, I can confidently see it being a top read of the year by the end of it." ―SFF World
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Flatiron Books; Reprint edition (January 9, 2024)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250859441
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250859440
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.38 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #64 in Occult Fiction
- #215 in Supernatural Thrillers (Books)
- #566 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Leigh Bardugo is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House and the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series) which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology—and much more. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.
For information on new releases and appearances, sign up for Leigh's newsletter: http://bit.ly/bardugonews.
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Top reviews from the United States
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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.
The story centers around Alex and her friends trying to bring Darlington back from Hell. Of course there are SIGNIFICANT obstacles, with the fact that Darlington is now part demon being a BIG one. Many of the minor characters in Ninth House step into major roles in Hell Bent - Dawes has more of a starring role, Turner comes back, Alex recruits Mercy and Tripp to get involved. And I LOVE having Darlington back, even though he's not really on the same plane of existence for most of the book. It's kind of amazing to me how he made such an impression on these people that they (and especially Alex) will risk their lives to bring him back. The flashbacks to the backgrounds of the "4 murderers" were super hard to read, but also so interesting to see what makes them tick. And the descriptions of Hell were so cool and trippy.
I again couldn't wrap my head around some of the things going on in this book. It's got a crazy combination of Yale/New Haven history and paranormal fantasy, along with very complicated, nuanced characters that just cries out for a reread. I'll definitely be at least rereading Hell Bent before the next release, if not Ninth House too.
This is my own personal issue, but I was DYING over the unresolved sexual tension between Darlington and Alex. I think I've been reading far too much romance lately, because I was constantly complaining about them secretly pining for each other (or at least appearing to do so) and doing nothing about it. Maybe there will be something in Book 3? Besides keeping demons from streaming into Yale, that's what I want to happen in the next book more than anything else.
Finally, I could read Darlington's highbrow quips and Alex's hilarious comebacks all day. I need to post some out of context quotes from this book at some point, because their conversations are infinitely quotable.
Top reviews from other countries
A capa é linda, a edição é muito boa e a história é maravilhosa. Hell Bent é agitado do começo ao fim de uma forma muito boa, é impossível ficar entediada durante a narrativa pois embora o livro seja grande ele te prende desde as primeiras páginas.
A relação dos personagens é maravilhosa de se ler, eu ri em vários momentos por causa do Turner, a Dawes continua sendo a minha protegida e eu amo a relação da Alex com o Darlington (mas ainda sobrevivo de migalhas com esse casal). Os outros personagens tbm são incríveis é o universo desse livro é muito perfeito.
Por fim, recomendo demais!
Reviewed in India on December 19, 2023
I really love the cover art, shipping was fast and book arrived without any knicks or damage.
Packing could've been made a little more secure.