My god, this was boring.

It took me two attempts to get through this book - when it originally released, the only thing anyone was talking about on Twitter was The Glowstick Scene (you know the one). The first attempt, I got that far (about 100 pages in), and immediately lost the will to live continue.

So, here we are again, 8 months later.

All that effort expended in Ninth House to describe the nine secret societies specialising in different types of magic was completely wasted, as the only House at all important to this book is, of course, Lethe, which consists of all of three people, one of whom is kind-of-dead, plus a bunch of older graduates/board members who only exist to cause problems for the main characters. Basically the “worldbuilding” aspect of Leigh’s writing has not improved from the Grisha Trilogy, where she invented a “complex” “scientific” (lol) magic system with all those color-coded orders of Grisha with different elemental powers, but the system was just wallpaper that never really mattered, because the two central characters mostly operated outside of it.

Most of the plot is spent researching, setting up, and enacting a ritual which will allow four characters to pass into hell to rescue Darlington’s soul, only for that attempt to end in failure. But never mind, because Alex realises she has the power to enter hell on her own, no ritual required, because…uh…I’ll be honest, I had tuned out by that point.

The story about the pet rabbit is a bizarre tangent which was never mentioned in the first book, despite supposedly being such a defining formative “loss of innocence” character moment that all of Alex’s visions in hell are related back to it (as opposed to the infamously groteseque defining formative “loss of innocence” character moment in Ninth House, which is conspicuously not revisited in this book). The “white rabbit” imagery feels wasted, because anyone with the slightest amount of cultural awareness is going to immediately connect it with Alice in Wonderland, and slightly more obscurely, hallucinogenic drugs (drug abuse being a major factor in the backstory), but Leigh herself never quite draws those connections.

For someone who has cited inspiration from (amongst others) classic poetry, Stephen King, and Anne Rice’s Vampire/Mayfair Witches mythos, Leigh’s vision of hell is extremely underwhelming, as is the sudden introduction of vampires to the plot. Once again, a lot of imagery is faintly sketched but never developed into anything meaningful - the four participants needed for the ritual to open hell vaguely call to mind the Four Horsemen; Darlington’s punishment in hell is to eternally rebuild the crumbling ruins of Black Elm, stacking stones in a manner that vaguely recalls Sisyphus pushing the boulder…but once again, all of this is just wallpaper.

Pammie Dawes is the saving grace of this book (and the previous book), and perhaps my favourite character that Leigh has written (admittedly, the bar is in hell), so it was fucking infuriating to have her big heroic moment saving Alex in Ninth House be boiled down to psychological trauma from seeing herself as being undesirable to men. The fact that Dawes is in love with Darlington is much de-emphasised (her reaction to his return from hell is disappointingly skimmed over, but then again, so is everyone’s), but Darlingstern also goes absolutely nowhere. People call this “slow burn”, but even to be a slow burn there has to be something happening. The one other time I out-loud told Leigh to fuck off was when she brazenly rewrote one of the iconic Darklina lines:

She never wants to know us until the rent is due, huh?

Really we don’t talk enough about the most glaring failure of this series, which is that, in this story - which is supposed to be a criticism of abuses of power, racism, misogyny etc etc in academia and in general - by far the most beloved character, the one who has engendered the most sympathy and empathy from the most readers, is the straight, white, cis-man.

This sort of thing has been the case in all three of Leigh’s series, it’s her whole brand, lmao

(Obviously, I say this without a trace of shade on the readers. I care about Darlington. I care about the Darkling, a whole fucking lot. But that’s not what Leigh was going for).

The fact that the man himself is barely present in this book (and is a very unremarkable background presence in every scene except for the couple which do focus on his intense knight/savior complex over Alex), suggests that Leigh has a lot more confidence in the magnetism of her other characters than I do. 

Overall the whole thing smacks of significant revisions/change of direction in the multiple years between books. I seem to remember an Instagram video(?) post-release where Leigh said her original idea for the Alex Stern books was a much longer and more episodic series (like Anita Blake or the Southern Vampire Mysteries), so perhaps the need to find a three-act structure caused it to suffer.