Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Spoiler warning: no major spoilers, but a lot of minor ones. This also won’t make any sense unless you’ve actually read the book.

I reread this book two years after it dropped in hopes that I had hallucinated it having been bad (I only remembered one plot point. I’ll give you a hint: it was glowing.) I was sorely disappointed.

Many elements of the book were a let-down, and it’ll be difficult for me to articulate why. I think the most pressing issue is that Hell Bent tries to pack too much plot into too short of a book and leaves character development by the wayside.

The central mystery of Ninth House is not who killed Tara Hutchins; it’s who Alex Stern is, and by extension who Darlington is, who Hellie and Len are, where did they go, why do we care. These are the questions the reader is trying to answer as they work their way through the book.

But Hell Bent just focuses on its moving parts—Eitan, Anselm, Reiter, Michelle, Walsh-Whitley, Darlington himself. In a Goodreads Q&A, Leigh Bardugo mentioned that the Alex Stern series was originally going to be, like, 12 books, then got shortened to 5, then 3, because they took so long to research… and unfortunately, that’s very apparent. Hell Bent felt like it was the premise of several different books frankensteined together.

Several books’ worth of character development gets awkwardly skipped over. Mercy, Tripp and Turner get awkwardly shoehorned into the main cast, with their character arcs hastily jammed in in the form of supercuts and flashbacks. I say this not because I think they shouldn’t be, but because I think they should’ve been given more screentime and development—each of them deserved their own book in the spotlight.

Tripp was particularly jarring; in the original book, he’s a hapless symbol of white privilege and the infinite second chances given to wealthy young boys. There’s hints of where Bardugo wants to go with his character—the minor reveal that he was instinctively aware of what Blake Keely was came all the way back in book 1—but the transition from set dressing to guy we are supposed to care about just isn’t actually executed. Mercy’s being brought into the fold is also clumsily done. She’s one of my favorite characters, but I think the revelations she has in Hell Bent can’t be contained within the span of a few conversations.

People complained about the pacing of Ninth House, but Ninth House was good because you watched things unravel slowly; Hell Bent sacrifices all of that and thus has the opposite problem (although it wasn’t a problem in the first place). Too much plot is crammed in. Nobody stops to take a breather and emotionally process what’s going on. Ninth House was self-aware in a way that Hell Bent is not.

And I really, truly hate to say this—because this series is not about Darlington, he is not the hero of this story, and that is part of the point. I’ve seen people act like the white man was the best part of the series and it drives me utterly insane—but he really should’ve had more screentime. I would’ve wanted to see his POV earlier. Hell Bent is, ostensibly, about rescuing him. The fun of Ninth House was piecing the story together from the split POVs; perhaps Hell Bent could’ve pulled a similar trick with Alex’s thoughts from above, and Darlington’s thoughts from below. I support him going off the rails, but I want to see that process occurring bit by bit, not just a jump-cut to him suddenly being naked and feral with claws and horns. Darlington’s entire premise is that he’s a gentleman—if he’s not acting the part, we need more than a few sentences on why.

The story read like one of my English essays: a haphazardly jammed-together collection of plot notes, impossible to treat with their proper gravitas. Any legitimately compelling moment fell flat, because there was no real buildup, just payoff, payoff, payoff, except for the payoff didn’t feel like payoff because there was no buildup to make it a payoff, and we didn’t even get the biggest payoff of the series that everybody was hoping for (IYKYK). Alas.

I don’t care if book 3 takes another four years (I actually do, but that’s beside the point)—just please let it make up for this.

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