Hell Bent

“You found me once, Stern. You'll find me again.”

This issue is a light one to start off with but I have to say Darlington in demon form radiates total YA energy. It feels like an image of a character designed with the express purpose of appealing to the tiktok girlies. He is totally naked and more muscular in demon form than in human form and his hair has grown to a sexy shoulder length and he has golden horns and golden eyes and golden tattoos and his “cock [is] very erect and shining like a supercharged, oversized glowstick” (65) (the fact that his erect penis is emitting a heavenly light is mentioned no less than three times in case you thought you misread this).

In a scene that seemingly comes out of nowhere, Alex decides on a whim to explain not only that magic is real to her normie roommate Mercy Zhao but also to summarize the entire plot of Ninth House including Darlington getting sent to hell and coming back half in and half out of reality as a literal demon who Alex needs to either save or kill before the hellbeast overtakes him and destroys the world or some shit. Mercy’s reaction leaves much to be desired in terms of being a reaction that a normal human being would have to anything at all. She immediately believes everything, says that it all makes sense given Alex’s behaviour the past year of sneaking out of the dorms sometimes and having the occasional depressive episode, and tells Alex not to lie to her again. She also mentions that she’s been using a therapy app because reviewers of Ninth House complained about Mercy’s seeming lack of doing anything post being a vehicle for a rape revenge plot and the author wants us to know she read those complaints and mercy is indeed in therapy. At the end of the conversation, most of which happens off page and is summarized in a sentence or two, when Alex is walking away, Mercy ends this already unnatural conversation with the most YA novel response one could have to learning that demons are real by asking Alex if Darlington is the reason she hasn’t dated anyone in the 12 months she has known her. Alex waffles about how he’s “too expensive” and also has horns and Mercy jokes about how well she has a birthmark shaped like wisconsin. Very bizarre to end this scene with playful teasing about the potential darlington/alex ship when one of the parties is currently trapped in a demonic circle half in half out of hell and might have to be put down if they can’t separate him from his demon in time.

Mercy Zhao’s entire character is predicated on being a non character. She is the ultimate NPC. Any reaction she has no matter how inhuman in its sheer lack of reaction can’t be called “out of character” because very little characterization was ever established to begin with. She is Nice, she is booksmart, and she wears quirky clothes. I hesitate to call this meagre collection of traits even two dimensional.

In Ninth House, Mercy exists because Leigh Bardugo wanted an excuse to have a scene where a rapist eats shit, so the rapist must first have a victim to rape, and Mercy just happens to be the vehicle through which this revenge plot travels. Someone needs to notify Alex’s mom of her temporary funk so she can be drawn out of said funk and progress the rest of the plot, and Mercy, who has not been in the narrative since the rape plot and will continue to not be in the narrative for the rest of the book, luckily just happens to be there.

I suspect Leigh Bardugo heard the negative response some critics had to Mercy’s lack of involvement in the first book, so in Hell Bent when Alex and the gang need a fifth person to complete their HellQuest, Mercy is just slotted in there to give her something to do. She doesn’t even join in on HellQuest proper, she just stands guard out of frame while everyone else goes to hell.

This Mercy effect, (being absent from the until Leigh Bardugo needs a side character to progress the plot and inexplicably materializing), is at its most literal and by extension most absurd in Chapter 9. Alex meets with Dawes to discuss plot shit which eventually leads to them debating how they are going to find a fifth person for HellQuest, when Mercy interrupts them stating that she will be their fifth person. Apparently she has just been sitting on the couch in the same room as them this entire time. She followed Alex in, and neither Alex or Dawes notice this whole ass human being entering and just sitting down within earshot for this entire conversation until they express their need for a side character and Mercy asserts herself as the one for the job. Alex and Dawes warn her of the danger of doing the hell portal opening ritual, but Mercy calmly tosses aside their concerns as if it is inconceivable that anyone but her could be doing the ritual. And Alex and Dawes also quickly just accept it. It’s like they’re all aware they are characters in a novel and it is unfathomable that anyone else would do this task, even someone more qualified (i.e. has known magic even existed for more than like a day) because Mercy is a named character and Leigh Bardugo has to make her a player in the plot because reviewers complained in the last book about Mercy disappearing from the book after her utility as a rape victim was finished.

Also in the vein of people not asking questions normal human beings would, a pivotal part of HellQuest is finding four murderers to walk the gauntlet. Alex, Dawes, and Turner have all already killed someone, so they use a magical slave catching device to locate their fourth murderer, who ends up being side character Tripp Helmuth. (As an aside, Turner is outraged at the repurposed slave catching magical gizmo, but aside from a line in the acknowledgements where Leigh Bardugo links a website about the history of slavery at Yale this never becomes relevant to the book in terms of plot or theme. To me it read as a shoehorned aside for Bardugo to let us know that she is in fact Aware of Slavery and its badness, but the legacy of slavery will never be interrogated by the book because it’s not relevant to Alex’s personal journey). Anyway, Tripp is presented as a bumbling idiot who the gang is just relieved to have as a fourth member. Not a single person stops to ask him “by the way Tripp, who did you murder?”. In fact nobody asks each other who they killed upon revelation that they did indeed kill someone, even though I feel like it would be something most people would at least be curious about, even a little.

After they’ve already gone to hell once, Mercy asks Alex who she killed, and Alex says some vague lines about it being “too many people” and how she doesn’t feel bad about any of it. Mercy responds to the revelation that Alex is a serial killer the same way she reacts to the revelation that magic is real, which is to say not at all. We as the audience know that the killings were all either in self defence or under the influence of ghost possession, and I guess Mercy is just in tune with the vibes of everything being chill. In a paragraph elaborating Alex’s angst she refers to herself as “the only real sinner in the bunch [the bunch in question being the murderers]”, because Dawes killed defending Alex from a violent attacker, Turner is a cop so presumably he just killed some guy on duty who had it coming (kind of a fucked up assumption imo but this review is long enough), and also absolves Tripp of any sin because “muddleheaded Tripp had no doubt bumbled into something he couldn’t handle” (242). This strikes me as kind of an insane claim to make when not only does Alex not know anything about who Tripp killed because nobody asked, but also because it was kind of a major theme of the first book about how rich white boys can use their wealth and status to absolve themselves of any responsibility in harming people less privileged. We soon learn through hell induced memory sharing shenanigans that Tripp is indeed Not a Bad Dude, he just chose not to act when his abuser died as a result of his own actions, but I don’t like how up until the reveal the novel frames the question of “wait, who did this guy murder?” as something we don’t even need to think about, let alone worry about.

Near the very end Hell Bent contains a graphic flashback of animal death and it's one of the most gruesome parts of the whole book. It took me a while to work out why I was so upset by this one scene of animal gore when there are so many human on human violence scenes in Ninth House which I didn't take offense to but other people did. I am not usually one to gate keep who can and cannot include certain material in their books, but I think the issue here for me stems from whether or not shocking content is appropriate to the rest of the text surrounding it. I didn't find the sexual assault scenes in Ninth House beyond the pale because one of the major themes of Ninth House is sexual assault and how people in power cover it up. The whole book in terms of theme and tone was building up to those sexual assault scenes. I didn't consider them shock value because they weren't shocking based on the way the book builds up to them in terms of plot and tone.

Hell Bent, however, lacks any thematic clarity that would make this scene necessary or even make sense thematically (I've already mentioned how Bardugo is willing to name drop acts of historical cruelty but doesn't actually follow up on them with the repurposed slave catching device). There seems to be very little thematic coherency here at all. It also isn't justified by the tone, because as mentioned, this book feels incredibly YA most of the time. Just recall my first point, Demington. It's very telling to me that Leigh Bardugo is willing to go into graphic detail of the murder of a beloved pet rabbit for shock value but refuses to let literally being physically trapped in hell affect Darlington in any way that would make him even marginally less sexy. It frankly seems kind of cowardly to me that she didn't even let Darlington look even a little fucked up! Gritty realism comes second in these books, Feeding Thirst is the top priority, at the expense of everything else.

I hate HellQuest so much it’s unreal. I was a defender of the first book from people who called it “boring” but even I have to admit this shit drags. The whole novel is just a series of failed rituals we have to hear about in excruciating detail to get free Darlington from hell and you can really feel the book treading water for the majority of the page length. After failed rituals a big fuss is made about finding murderers to walk the gauntlet to enter hell and it’s a whole big thing with so much page space dedicated to it, and it fails like all the rituals before it. Darlington’s soul isn’t freed until 400 pages in, when he tells Alex that because of her special abilities she can literally just choose to enter hell herself without any rituals, and she does. It feels kind of audacious for Leigh Bardugo to waffle on for 400 pages about every step of this complicated ritual to get into hell and have the characters go through with the ritual and suffer and fail, only for that to be followed up “oh btw you could just step through this portal to hell any time you want because of your specialness” and having the protagonist just skip the several hundred page process by walking through a portal to solve the problem. Anyway after Darlington is freed HellQuest isn’t over because they have to go back AGAIN for plot reasons, but they need all four to go and only Alex can fast travel so we have to watch them walk the gauntlet AGAIN. And then! And then! The cliffhanger at the end! Is that hell is still open! And they have to do HellQuest AGAIN in the third book!!!!!!!!!!! What The Fuck! What The Fuck! I HATE HellQuest! It’s So BORING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

soooo we're gonna meet Satan in this?

2021????? *eye twitches*

"You always looked like you had trouble chasing you."
Alex jabbed the door-close button. "So?"
"Now you look like it caught up."