When your school crest is composed of figs, wasps, and carnivorous deer, you know you’re in for an interesting school year… If anyone has the aesthetics of horror down, it’s Cassandra Khaw, who broke into the genre back in 2021 with Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I had the pleasure of interviewing Khaw before that book’s release to get their thoughts on hauntings and horror novellas. Now Khaw is trying their hand at dark academia with The Library at Hellebore, which came out just last week. If you’re craving more books about magically powerful young adults at deadly schools after finishing Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, then you’ll definitely want to check this one out!
Alessa Li never wanted to enroll at Hellebore. But with the magical ability to unravel anyone from the inside and string their guts from the rafters with only a twitch of her thoughts, Alessa is given no choice but to become a boarder at the premier school for anti-Christs, world-eaters, and anyone else with apocalypse-level powers. Among her classmates are a literal son of Lucifer, a boy infested by cicada gods, and an unassuming individual who speaks with a voice like the one that spoke the world into creation. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted offers them all salvation and purpose if they can learn to rein their powers into productivity within its halls. But as Alessa’s escape attempts fail and she and her peers are faced with graduation, she realizes Hellebore never intended to let them go. Khaw cleverly divides the narrative into before and after the fateful events of graduation day and alternates between the two timelines in order to slowly reveal the truth about the school, its faculty, and its most dangerous pupils.
The Library at Hellebore takes a particularly interesting approach to the concepts of friendship, morality, and what we owe each other and ourselves. “Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive” is a motto repeated by multiple characters throughout the book. Alessa is, by her own admission, not a good person. And as the reality show cliché goes, she is not here to make friends. She has brutally killed several people before her enrollment at Hellebore and will kill several more before the story’s end. She is rude and brusque to most of her peers and has no desire to explain her actions and present herself in a better light. Nonetheless, though she often dismisses them as naive, she feels a certain admiration for her classmates who approach the world with kindness, friendliness, and altruism. She feels obligated to help and protect others who have treated her well, and this feeling is amplified for those she views as being inherently good people. And at the end of the day, no matter how broken and dangerous she believes herself to be, there are lines Alessa won’t cross. She is disgusted by those who revel in causing harm and who target innocents. Alessa has a strong sense of justice, which—in a brutally unjust world—easily morphs into an urge for vengeance.
For a dark academia novel, though, I will say that there is not much in the way of academics going on at Hellebore. The students attend classes every day, but they aren’t learning much. The classes are assigned randomly, with no connection to the students’ interests or abilities. The teachers are oddly inhuman and they seem to be motivated by something other than a love for imparting knowledge. And don’t even get started on the library, which does all in its power to prevent students from accessing books. Even those who—unlike Alessa—fully devote themselves to their studies wind up frustrated that these studies get them no closer to the answers they seek. One might read this as a commentary on the modern education system, building on a line of critique within other dark academia novels (such as Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House) that call out academic institutions for all too often exploiting their most vulnerable students and limiting access to only those already in power. Or, one could just as easily argue that this is simply a horror novel that happens to be set in a school rather than truly engaging in the dark academia literary tradition. Readers will have to judge for themselves.
Whether you’re in it for the dark academia aesthetic or you have a love for morally gray female characters embracing their power, The Library at Hellebore is a fun, if bloody, read. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. I especially recommend getting this one in hardcover, since the publisher went all out on sprayed edges, gorgeous end papers, and little chapter illustrations. If you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!