A Review of Hell Bent (Alex Stern #2) by Leigh Bardugo
Spoilers Abound. Reader Beware.
I’ll get the lame joke out of the way right off the bat and say that I devoured this book almost as fast as that hell beast devoured Darlington in Ninth House.
As far as sequels go, this doesn’t surpass the original, but neither does it fall far below that level; it’s like a 1 and 1a situation. This is decidedly more action packed, what with the literal journey to hell and lack of required exhibition, but there’s still lots of new stuff to be found.
I continue to be impressed with the way Leigh Bardugo is able to weave the fantastical with the real. The Yale campus, if you’ve ever seen it, already looks pretty magical (I’ve always thought it looks like Hogwarts). It’s a point that bears repeating that I think fantasy in fiction is most effective when it’s juxtaposed, or in this case laid right over, the real. It makes magic seem more possible when you can see and touch parts of a story with your own eyes and hands.
I’m not sure if it was intentional on her part, but I find it hilarious that the library is an actual portal to hell. I know when I was in college, different parts of the campus were intimidating enough to make it feel like I was descending into the underworld, and I love a library, but having to deal with card catalogs and microfiche (and needing to know Boolean search terms instead of just going to Google) doesn’t make it seem all that far out of the realm of possibility.
It’s interesting to think that Alex, as an interloper of sorts, is often more comfortable dealing with the arcane than the commonplace. All I could keep thinking about, as I went through this book as well as Ninth House, is a recurring dream I have where I’m in school, it’s finals day or there’s a big test, and I realize that I’ve forgotten to go to class for the entire semester, or I lost my books or some such thing. I never actually had that happen, and I’m sure it means something more, but I could empathize with Alex on so many levels, coming from the world she comes from and being thrust into a place like Yale, and actually having to do the work.
Thinking about that, it’s also nice to see how much Alex has grown from the first book, and how much more comfortable she seems amongst the Yale elite than she did in the beginning. It very much mirrors how she increasingly feels at home in the world of the supernatural, which I always found odd because that’s a world she’s technically belonged to since birth. It’s odd how one can still feel out of place even in the places we’re supposed to be. Anyways, I always appreciated that she never cared much about knowing she was different and not belonging, despite knowing that it was true. It makes me think about imposter syndrome (which in turn makes me think about my weird recurring dream), but I’m not sure if Bardugo intended it to be that way. Whether she did or not, it’s worth mentioning that that Alex never lets it affect her in that she never comes close to thinking about quitting, or that it impugns her self-worth. Like she says in the first book, she might be shit, but she’s shit that sticks.
Overall, I didn’t have many complaints about the book at all, with the exception of the introduction of vampires to the mythos. It literally came out of nowhere, so it’s funny to think that in a world filled with demons and all sorts of esoterica that vampires can seem unrealistic, but there you have it. I also find it a little jarring, but no less interesting, that it’s her encounter with a vampire that leaves Alex the most scared she’s ever been. And she’s been both sexually assaulted by a ghost, encountered a hell beast, and gone to actual hell at this point. If I had to play armchair psychologist here, I would say that it’s probably what makes the vampire as a mythological figure so interesting in the first place – they are the monsters that look just like us, and as is the case with Alex, she had no idea she was in danger until fangs were in her neck.
While the whole vampire thing did feel cheap to me at first, the more I think about it though, the more I feel like our reaction as readers follows the same path as Alex as protagonist (WTF Vampires?!). That feeling goes away almost entirely once you get to the actual explanation for vampires in this mythos (they’re essentially demons that invade/eat host bodies, thus replacing the host). They can’t be made, humans can’t be turned, one basically gets possessed and replaced. I’m still a little iffy on the how of it – demons aren’t ephemeral like spirits, they’re corporeal to an extent? Why do they seem to remember who they used to be, or their host/sponsor body was? I’m not really sure, but I’m hoping we’ll get clarification in book three since it appears as if the vampires are going to be the main adversaries. I’m definitely gonna need to go back and review on this one, but at least we got some choice interactions with vampire Tripp out of the whole thing. It was probably my favorite out of a few really good comedic asides.
Alex traced her fingers over the letters. “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.”
Now for the demon in the room, the thing I was hoping for most here: Darlington is back (I’m a basic bitch, I know). He spent most of the book naked in a circle of protection (fingers crossed that some internet artist decides to make that image come to life), but he finally fully makes it back to the world of the living, even though it winds up taking Alex a couple of tries to get him out of hell. He’s a little hornier (that’s two bad jokes now), but otherwise the same. I hadn’t realized it at all at first, but there’s a nice little callback to book one when Darlington says he’ll serve Alex until the end of days – in book one it’s said in jest, but in book two, it winds up being quite literal.
These two are on a collision course to something big with each other in the future, but I can’t figure out if Bardugo is dangling that romantic carrot or if she’s actually going to deliver. I’m inclined to believe that the Alex/Darlington coupling is inevitable because you don’t just go into hell for a mentor. On second thought, if anyone did, it would be Alex – she’s nothing if not fiercely loyal to those that are good to her, and she says repeatedly that she owes Darlington. She also says a couple of times that he looks good naked (c’mon fan art), so they’re probably going to smash at some point, and it’s going to make for some interesting dynamics, given that Darlington is an actual demon in actual servitude to Wheelwalker/goddess Alex. It gives a whole new perspective on sub/dom dynamics in romance, and I’m eager (aka a pervert) to see how it plays out. Right now they’re basically a demon-fighting Holmes and Watson, and that in itself is enticing enough to make me want to read their further adventures, even without the prospect of demonic, magical smut. Historically Leigh hasn’t really done anything explicit in her prior work, but that was YA, and even though YA gets far more explicit than I would have expected these days, this is an Adult Novel, so the deviant that I am is hoping it gets ADULT adult at some point. I am a boring married person and I need to get my kicks somehow.
Debauched inclinations aside, as characters Alex and Darlington work so well together. If I had to pick a literary term I’d say they’re foils for each other (Preppy Darlington and Tattooed Alex), but they’re more alike than they appear, especially now that Darlington is a demon. They started at opposite ends of the spectrum and are slowly meeting in the middle, in more ways than one. It’s been intriguing to see Alex slowly becoming more scholarly like Darlington, and it will be even more interesting to see Darlington get a little more wild, as Alex used to be.
In any case, it seems like in the world of Alex Stern, nothing is really what it seems – staid libraries are hell portals, tattooed ex-junkies are secretly heroes, and the nice boy in the Sperry Topsiders has a (literal) wild side. Here’s hoping that there are many more (well at least one because trilogies seem to be the thing these days) Alex/Darlington adventures ahead of us, and at least one of them involves the beast with two backs in addition to the actual beasts we’ve seen so far (three bad jokes, sorry).
Keep It To Your Shelf 