"Hell Bent", Leigh Bardugo
28 March 2025 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI was a bit sceptical at the end of my review of "Ninth House" as to how desirable a sequel was likely to be, but I went to the trouble of seeking out a copy of "Hell Bent" and then paying repeat visits to the library until it was finally back on the shelves for me to borrow. Unfortunately, as I had feared, this book isn't nearly as successful as its predecessor; it's not *bad* as such, and as with the previous volume I consumed it more or less non-stop in a couple of days of breathless reading to find out what happened next, but on its own it definitely wouldn't have inspired me to go looking for more in the same vein.
I think partly it suffers from 'middle book syndrome', in that all the world-building that was such a fascinating part of the initial novel has already been carried out; the closest we get here to all the gradual unveiling of how Lethe and the fraternities work is the little 'catalogue entries' between chapters detailing various items in the Lethe armoury/museum, which I did enjoy. Partly it suffers from what feels like revisionism where its own predecessor is concerned; having used Alex's backstory as a significant part of the plot in "Ninth House", Bardugo now retrospectively inserts a major new element into those events (Babbit Rabbit, as featured on the cover...), and while I'm not averse to the further development of Hellie, who always did seem a bit idealised in Alex's memories, it's hard to credit that Alex simply didn't mention this in her original account.
A big part of "Ninth House" was the detective plot running alongside the gradual revelation of the backstory to the opening events, and "Hell Bent" makes what I'm afraid feels like a rather cursory attempt to duplicate that. But there really doesn't seem to be any point to the handful of "Last Summer" chapters here, which could have been told in straight chronological order at the start of the book or incorporated into the subsequent visit to Linus Reiter, and the murder mystery strand is virtually skated over and eventually dismissed as little more than a demon's liking for puzzles. There didn't seem to be much reason for either of them to be in there this time round. The author also re-deploys the shock card of 'senior members of Lethe are secretly working on the other side'; it does seem a little unlikely that Alex's second set of back-up adults would also turn out to be all untrustworthy.
But the biggest let-down for me, I'm afraid, was the basic Rescue Darlington element. The plot is much more linear than in the previous book, being in effect just a series of repeat attempts to visit hell (there is an interesting and sadly underdeveloped hypothesis that 'hell' and 'heaven' may be simply a set-up for the supernatural to feed on the negative and positive emotions of humans respectively...) Of course the characters have to keep failing for one reason or another, or there wouldn't be much of a novel -- and then the author plays one of my least favourite cards, in the form of 'actually none of this was necessary because there was an easy way to do it right from the start'.
And Darlington himself... is practically unrecognisable. It doesn't even feel like the same character, and not even in an 'oh no, he has been horribly corrupted by hell' sense -- there are a couple of very brief gestures in that direction, which would have led to a lot more angst, but what we get instead is a sort of generic YA super-sex-symbol (complete with glowing erection(?!)) version with long hair, horns and superpowers, who is now magically enslaved to Alex. He doesn't sound like Darlington in most of his dialogue, and in the few brief scenes we get from his point of view his mental processes don't feel like Darlington either; in fact they don't feel much like anyone, being pretty bland. We get him back, but the tragedy is that he isn't the person we missed any more -- it would have been better, far better (as I suspected at the end of the first book) to have killed him off to devastating effect at that point, rather than losing the essence of what made him so uniquely enjoyable. I didn't enjoy what felt like blatant 'shipping' of him with Alex, either; one of the things I liked about the characterisation of their relationship in the first book was that there were only the tiniest intermittent moments of sexual awareness, but here you've got full-on in-your-face fantasies going on ("he wanted to place himself between Alex's legs and [lap at her like a greedy animal]"), and to me at least that's a lot less attractive -- or effective.
What I *did* enjoy was the development of Dawes, who becomes a major protagonist in Darlington's absence but, vitally, without losing her original characterisation, the re-introduction of Alex's room-mate Mercy Zhao (who, it is hinted at one point, would be suited to become a new Dante to Alex's Virgil, which would be an interesting development), and the new Praetor in the shape of Professor Walsh-Whiteley, who manages to be unappealing and politically incorrect without being Evil (a nuance somewhat lacking from the over-acted horror of 'this artifact is *wicked* and should be destroyed because it was once used to locate escaped slaves' or 'these glowing coals were created by the elite from the souls of oppressed immigrants' -- again, one element I had praised in "Ninth Gate" was its decision not to go down the cheap road of equating institutional culpability with supernatural crime...)
While this book has the same nominal setting as its predecessor it seems to lack the sense of academia that was one of its attractions -- and because Alex isn't struggling with her work this time round (we are told at the beginning of the book that she has been reading up in advance, and to be fair I would probably have found it repetitive to re-use that plot element) the result is that we get to see a lot less of that part of her existence at Yale, which I felt to be a pity. I'd probably still be up for a sequel to see if the author can recapture the spirit of discovery from the first book, but overall this one felt more like generic urban fantasy, and from the indications in the final chapters I'm not optimistic that a concluding trilogy volume is likely to be any less so.
I think partly it suffers from 'middle book syndrome', in that all the world-building that was such a fascinating part of the initial novel has already been carried out; the closest we get here to all the gradual unveiling of how Lethe and the fraternities work is the little 'catalogue entries' between chapters detailing various items in the Lethe armoury/museum, which I did enjoy. Partly it suffers from what feels like revisionism where its own predecessor is concerned; having used Alex's backstory as a significant part of the plot in "Ninth House", Bardugo now retrospectively inserts a major new element into those events (Babbit Rabbit, as featured on the cover...), and while I'm not averse to the further development of Hellie, who always did seem a bit idealised in Alex's memories, it's hard to credit that Alex simply didn't mention this in her original account.
A big part of "Ninth House" was the detective plot running alongside the gradual revelation of the backstory to the opening events, and "Hell Bent" makes what I'm afraid feels like a rather cursory attempt to duplicate that. But there really doesn't seem to be any point to the handful of "Last Summer" chapters here, which could have been told in straight chronological order at the start of the book or incorporated into the subsequent visit to Linus Reiter, and the murder mystery strand is virtually skated over and eventually dismissed as little more than a demon's liking for puzzles. There didn't seem to be much reason for either of them to be in there this time round. The author also re-deploys the shock card of 'senior members of Lethe are secretly working on the other side'; it does seem a little unlikely that Alex's second set of back-up adults would also turn out to be all untrustworthy.
But the biggest let-down for me, I'm afraid, was the basic Rescue Darlington element. The plot is much more linear than in the previous book, being in effect just a series of repeat attempts to visit hell (there is an interesting and sadly underdeveloped hypothesis that 'hell' and 'heaven' may be simply a set-up for the supernatural to feed on the negative and positive emotions of humans respectively...) Of course the characters have to keep failing for one reason or another, or there wouldn't be much of a novel -- and then the author plays one of my least favourite cards, in the form of 'actually none of this was necessary because there was an easy way to do it right from the start'.
And Darlington himself... is practically unrecognisable. It doesn't even feel like the same character, and not even in an 'oh no, he has been horribly corrupted by hell' sense -- there are a couple of very brief gestures in that direction, which would have led to a lot more angst, but what we get instead is a sort of generic YA super-sex-symbol (complete with glowing erection(?!)) version with long hair, horns and superpowers, who is now magically enslaved to Alex. He doesn't sound like Darlington in most of his dialogue, and in the few brief scenes we get from his point of view his mental processes don't feel like Darlington either; in fact they don't feel much like anyone, being pretty bland. We get him back, but the tragedy is that he isn't the person we missed any more -- it would have been better, far better (as I suspected at the end of the first book) to have killed him off to devastating effect at that point, rather than losing the essence of what made him so uniquely enjoyable. I didn't enjoy what felt like blatant 'shipping' of him with Alex, either; one of the things I liked about the characterisation of their relationship in the first book was that there were only the tiniest intermittent moments of sexual awareness, but here you've got full-on in-your-face fantasies going on ("he wanted to place himself between Alex's legs and [lap at her like a greedy animal]"), and to me at least that's a lot less attractive -- or effective.
What I *did* enjoy was the development of Dawes, who becomes a major protagonist in Darlington's absence but, vitally, without losing her original characterisation, the re-introduction of Alex's room-mate Mercy Zhao (who, it is hinted at one point, would be suited to become a new Dante to Alex's Virgil, which would be an interesting development), and the new Praetor in the shape of Professor Walsh-Whiteley, who manages to be unappealing and politically incorrect without being Evil (a nuance somewhat lacking from the over-acted horror of 'this artifact is *wicked* and should be destroyed because it was once used to locate escaped slaves' or 'these glowing coals were created by the elite from the souls of oppressed immigrants' -- again, one element I had praised in "Ninth Gate" was its decision not to go down the cheap road of equating institutional culpability with supernatural crime...)
While this book has the same nominal setting as its predecessor it seems to lack the sense of academia that was one of its attractions -- and because Alex isn't struggling with her work this time round (we are told at the beginning of the book that she has been reading up in advance, and to be fair I would probably have found it repetitive to re-use that plot element) the result is that we get to see a lot less of that part of her existence at Yale, which I felt to be a pity. I'd probably still be up for a sequel to see if the author can recapture the spirit of discovery from the first book, but overall this one felt more like generic urban fantasy, and from the indications in the final chapters I'm not optimistic that a concluding trilogy volume is likely to be any less so.