Books book reviews The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw Is a Vicious Dark Academia One of Cassandra Khaw’s most fascinating, horrifying worlds to date—and a great place for new readers to meet their brilliant mind. By Martin Cahill | Published on September 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Alessa Li has a problem. Well, several problems. She has been forcibly relocated to Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if it wasn’t literally one of the worst places in the world—an academy for the dangerously powerful, those for whom ruin runs in their veins, many of them one bad day away from unleashing apocalypse. She’s been paired with a roommate who she cannot stand and whom she may have quite possibly murdered (we’ll come back to that); she has a magic within her, and it is hungry, maybe just as hungry as Alessa is for escape; and to top it all off, she’s currently trapped in the library at Hellebore with a handful of students who survived the school-wide massacre, as the staff has suddenly moved to literally devour every student present.  Hey, Dark Academia genre? Cassandra Khaw just said, “Bet?” and pushed all their chips into the middle of the table. If you’ve read Khaw’s work before, then you know what you’re in for: compulsive, complicated, contradictory characters each trying to navigate the otherworldly circumstances of their lives. Prose that sizzles and spats. Worldbuilding that is sublime, imagery that will make your jaw tense with the beautiful grotesquerie described, and a story that will make you pissed for these characters, and mourn their losses. And let me tell you, there are losses. Lots of ‘em. But that’s also what makes this book so special, and what elevates this beyond a gory pick-em-off story is the tenacity of hope, the value of trying to survive even when the odds are against you, and making peace with the inevitable.  It’s no secret that Khaw fulfills the promise of the premise, that while these students are trapped in the Library, with a hungry faculty salivating outside, well… not everyone gets out alive. Forced together to survive in terrible circumstances, this group of students do their best to do right by each other, (most of them, anyway). Among the remaining students are an illegitimate son of Lucifer, a chosen voice for an eldritch force, a hive mind drone losing herself to the creature within, an augur who reads his own entrails, and of course, our Alessa, whose dangerous power lives in her body, and is of bodies, specifically, manipulation of yours, hers, and anyone within reach, down to the cellular level. But for all that the Faculty are waiting for these students to sell each other out, manipulate, maim, and sacrifice the others to save their own skin, the majority of them really try not to.  Buy the Book The Library at Hellebore Cassandra Khaw Buy Book The Library at Hellebore Cassandra Khaw Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Khaw has crafted an engaging, bittersweet collection of outsiders, whose otherness is literalized by their enrollment in Hellebore. While there are some that fit the bill of Darwinian fuck-you survivalists, Alessa and those she spends the most time with understand that they’re in community with each other— that here, at the very least, they can all recognize in each other some spark of humanity, even as their humanity might very well be fading as they face gods, monsters, and magic. And Alessa, bless her, may be a prickly, irritable, bit of an asshole, but even she sees the moment for what it is: If they’re going to die, they’re not going to do it to each other. And if they’re going to go out, they’re going to go out swinging. Khaw provides texture to this thesis in many ways; some students are little beacons of hope, while others are slick opportunists, with many in between these poles. But, they all want to live. And Alessa, despite not wanting to be, becomes the glue keeping them together and united as long as possible; for someone who has been through the wringer and seen the worst, Khaw paints Alessa kindly; it may be because of that horror that she can see the value in working together as long as possible, to say fuck the monsters, we’re not throwing each other to the wolves. In a book with this much blood and guts, the most heart we see is in the actions of Alessa and her comrades as they work to make it through the worst of situations as best as possible. It’s like what if Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru was a writhing, conglomeration of souls intent on devouring you.  One of my favorite aspects of the novel is the timeline maneuvering that Khaw deftly engages in; we meet Alessa at, technically, the scene of a crime where she supposedly murdered her roommate. Then we find ourselves in the Library, suddenly trapped. And then we’re back at the very beginning, when she first arrives at Hellebore where all of this story starts. The time-hopping took me a few chapters to get used to, but once you see the pattern, it becomes an irresistible device with which Khaw paints a bittersweet picture of Alessa’s reluctant friendships, her frustrating attempts to escape, the growing dread of the Faculty as their hunger becomes less and less hidden, and how the past influences the present dire situation. It’s really brilliantly done, and scene after scene, this story shines like blacklight in a blood-spattered parlor.  The Library at Hellebore is a fantastic place for new readers of Khaw to meet their brilliant mind, which worked like hell to give us one of the most fascinating, horrifying worlds of theirs to date. (I haven’t even mentioned The Librarian yet; let’s just say you don’t want to owe a late fee to this being.) Through Alessa’s sharp, incisive point of view, the world of Hellebore is brought to life—her dry and wry observations, her tactical and dextrous perspective when her back is against the wall. Alessa’s voice is that of a predator who knows larger, hungrier beasts lurk nearby. And through her sharp-as-nails spirit and her tenacious heart, we see that when you’ve been on the outside your whole life, when the world wants to eat you, it’s always worth standing up and trying to survive. And The Library At Hellebore and Cassandra Khaw ultimately teach us this: Even if you get eaten, that doesn’t mean you have to let yourself be swallowed. At least, not without a fight. [end-mark] The Library at Hellebore is published by Nightfire. The post <i>The Library at Hellebore</i> by Cassandra Khaw Is a Vicious Dark Academia appeared first on Reactor.