Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy!! I don't know how to feel about this. It reminds me a lot of The Locked Tomb series, but smooshed into a singular book and with a lot more body horror. I think to grasp this one is a couple of rereads.

What happens when you send a bunch of apocalypse-level teens to boarding school? Nothing good and everything gloriously horrifying.
In The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted, the students aren't just dangerous; they are the danger in the world. The kind of kids that get locked away, not enrolled. Alessa finds this out the hard way when she's kidnapped and forcibly brought to the Institute. Promised redemption and a path to normalcy, she quickly realizes Hellebore has its agenda. On graduation day, the staff transform into monsters and devour the students. Yes, it's as wild as it sounds. Trapped in the school's labyrinth library, Alessa and her reluctant classmates must survive, maybe?

I loved the relentless tension, the gruesome creativity of the world-building, and the darkly funny student interactions. The stakes are tremendously high, and no one is safe. Alessa's voice carries the story with grit and tenacity, and the other characters are ruthless and unpredictable. The pacing felt so breathless it offered very little time to reflect between the chaos and the wild twists. It's a book that's meant to be devoured in one sitting. You are exhausted from all the tension and suspense. It was a brutal, entertaining ride that blends dark academia, a twist-filled story drenched in gore, body horror, and razor-sharp banter.

Thank you, NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group/ Torn Nightfire, for the opportunity to review and provide my honest feedback.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

There were pieces of this I really enjoyed, but for a lot of it I felt like I was thrown in the deep end without context. I just wanted more of an introduction to the characters and setting, because without it I had no one to really root for

My goodness gracious. Lovely, bloody, hellish, heartbreaking, vicious, cruel, gory yet beautiful.

The lyrical beauty of The Salt Grows Heavy but in dark academia. The characters, the gory visuals, the anger, the violence. I am so here for it. Look at this muthafukin sentence:

“So I rent him in half: lengthwise and real fucking slow, suspending him in the air so his guts sheeted down on me like a porridgy red rain.”

My gosh. Every sentence is transportive to a lovely bitter hellish place. The timeline is completely batshit and I was lost amid the glory, but that still is an amazing place to be.

This is why I read horror.

I was really excited to get this ARC because I liked Khaw's last couple of books quite a bit, but I do have mixed feelings about it. I am going to mention a lot of spoilers, so heads up to stop if you're reading this and wanna go in totally fresh. But yeah, I have so many questions about the plot. Like, why did this have to be at a school at all? They barely even mention anything school related and if the whole point of the school is to eat all of the students at their graduation, then why not just eat them right away? Like, do people graduate sometimes? It says that there are students who voluntarily go there, so there have to be at least some people, right? If no one ever leaves after graduating, then you'd think people would wonder why and maybe not send their kids there. Also, why do they eat them at all? What even is the faculty and why do they turn into a blob monster? Either way, what's the point of having them pretend to be at school for an indeterminate amount of time at all if you're just going to eat them all? It doesn't make any sense. And yeah, the time thing. There's really no indication of how much time they actual go to this school before they "graduate", so the time jumps are confusing as hell. There were times when I forgot if we were at a "day one" or "before" chapter, and got super lost because it seemed like some scenes happened during the same time when they didn't. Also, basically every character is awful, so I didn't care at all what happened to any of them. Especially the main character. She was so ridiculously unpleasant. The few who seemed redeemable were barely in the book, so I didn't get to know them enough to care either, so there wasn't really any suspense. This book should 100% have been at least 100 pages longer to spend time on setup and character development. Like, I still don't understand what almost any of their powers were and I forgot who several characters were because they only popped up a few times and were all of a sudden super important to the plot. Like Adam who's power was fire, I guess? But, also like regeneration or something? I don't know. Besides the character issues, things happen so abruptly that it felt like the book started like halfway through the story. Then there was the insane vocabulary. Every other page, characters who otherwise speak in a completely contemporary way will throw out the most unnecessarily complex word that no one would ever use in casual conversation. I'm very glad I read this on a kindle because I would have stopped reading it if I had to put down the book to google words as often as some random ass thing like "coruscating" would pop up. It drove me crazy.

All that being said, I definitely didn't hate the book. I know it sounds like I did, but it was very fun. I do love horror and gore quite a bit, so I had a pretty great time reading it and sped through it pretty fast because I really wanted to know where it was going. I wouldn't mind more books in this universe to expand on things more, because it sounded really interesting and I think you could do a lot with what basically sounds like an entire planet of magic people, monsters and gods. Like the whole "skinless wolf" thing. It was like Lovecraftian cosmic horror and folk horror combined and I'd love more of that. I would definitely recommend it if you can handle gore because it is super violent, but go in expecting more of a horror story that takes place in a weird building than dark academia.

The gothic, sinister elements paired with intense emotional stakes made me devour this book in one sitting. I loved the dark themes and the unpredictability of the plot. It’s the kind of book that grips you with its atmosphere and keeps you hooked with its twists and turns. If you’re into dark, twisted academia with high stakes, this will not disappoint. It’s everything I love about the genre, taken to an even darker, more diabolical level. A must-read for anyone who loves their academic settings with a side of horror.

Disclosure Statement: I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher. My thoughts and opinions of the book are entirely my own and have not been influenced in any way by either the author or the publisher.

When it comes to Cassandra Khaw's work, I expect a certain level of commitment to big philosophical concepts. What they do best, in my opinion, is taking the familiar and making it almost wholly unfamiliar again, high strangeness wielded as elegant allegory or metaphor. That's mostly what I got from The Library at Hellebore, which is an extremely weird horror novel full of novel character concepts and a very bitter, increasingly angry central theme.

In a lot of ways, I felt like the story read like a forgotten anime; the characters all share some strange quirkiness, personalities built around their strange magical powers. Unlike most dark academia involving young magicians, Khaw spends virtually no time walking us through a typical schoolyear in the life of young magical prodigies. Instead, The Library at Hellebore is all horror all the way down, the novel's perspective oscillating between a time before the inciting incident of the story and after, following one particular "student" of Hellebore as she lives through the final days of the institution's horrific magical education.

What follows then isn't so much a narrative, in my opinion, but a list of grievances. The story flashes to important interactions between the principal cast of characters as they navigate what they think they want from life and how life actually ends up for them. The central metaphor here is one of loss, of destruction, of greed and exploitation and consumption. As a story, it can sometimes feel strained to work, but as a metaphor for the world outside our real life doors, I think the book sings. It's terrifying and miserably bitter, but the spine of the book is spite--spite for unfair systems, spite for the privileged who get what's coming for them, spite for the miserable people who are just doing their best to survive, a misanthropy that pervades just about every line even as the book is also clearly desperate for human connection.

The theme is treated with exceptional nuance in spite of its recurring tonal motifs, capable of truly moving prose and ideas, clearly voiced statements that act as reflections of our moment. This feels like a book at the precipice of violent revolution. But in its fervor to chase down all that righteous rage and hide all of its insecurities, it also sort of forgets a more conventionally satisfying story--characterization taking a back seat to the broader message, for example. That's not to say that the book doesn't hit hard, but for me the characters felt less and less full-throated than the broader message of the book as it drew closer and closer to its conclusion.

Regardless of my taste for story, I found this to be a gripping read full of ideas I have rarely seen emulated in other fictions, thoroughly disquieting and playful in its employment of magic and theme. I honestly cannot wait to see what else is in the tank for Khaw, as I've come to trust their intuition for impactful storytelling.

Welcome to Hellebore Technical Institute, where the faculty wants to eat you and your classmates might be the harbingers of the apocalypse. No pressure.
Cassandra Khaw delivers a brutal, eerie, and utterly chaotic ride.

🔪 What I loved:
✔ A twisted take on dark academia with body horror.
✔ A diverse, messy cast of apocalypse bringers
✔ The tension? Unrelenting. The atmosphere? Suffocating!

If you love dark academia but want more blood, terror, and monstrous professors, The Library at Hellebore is your next obsession.

Dark academia/horror that is somehow super funny and heart wrenching. This was my first book of Khaw's but I'm so excited to read more! There's an incredible twist and I want to go back to before I read it so I can reread it again for the first time.

Cassandra Khaw is a master of deeply dark stories and complex characters who often border on unlikeable. But for Khaw’s work, the unlikeable nature of the characters often serves the story at hand, with unapologetic awareness of themselves that keeps things interesting along the way. This book is deeply visceral and horrific, starting the story off immediately with a traumatizing death that sets the tone for the rest of the book and tells us this: no one is safe, and there’s nothing these students won’t do to survive.

But what’s really going on is the mystery that we’re ultimately unraveling and who—if any—will make it to the end of the story.

The Library at Hellebore is horrific ride that challenges the most powerful and gifted students with survival at a school that is very literally eat or be eaten.

Cassandra Khaw is a master of creating combinations of nouns and adjectives I never thought possible. The prose is incredibly lush, for some it may be over-descriptive, particularly in the gory, nasty bits (and there are A LOT of them). It is macabre, a little campy and funny, and Hellebore is a weird place, full of weirder, stranger beings, with our main character being no exception.

Personally, I found the back and forth between the past and present a bit clunky and it took away from the imminent situation at hand. I never felt inclined towards any of the characters despite their banter and backstories, although I liked the idea of them all and enjoyed their strange abilities. I really enjoyed other works by this author and while it wasn't my full cup of tea, I believe many horror and dark academia fans will really enjoy this.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor/Forge for the ARC!

Given Cassandra Khaw's reputation for intriguing storytelling and the darkly fascinating premise of "The Library at Hellebore," I dove in eagerly. The novel immediately plunges the reader into the unsettling, atmospheric territory I've come to associate with their work, showcasing that signature blend of the brutal and the beautiful right from the start. Khaw's prose—incredibly lush and visceral, often simultaneously grotesque and strikingly poetic—is on full display here, painting the dark academia setting and the ensuing horror with vivid, unflinching intensity. The atmosphere is thick, gothic, and potent.

The premise itself, trapping 'monstrous' students in the library during a horrifying faculty feeding frenzy, felt perfectly suited to Khaw's penchant for high-stakes survival scenarios against overwhelming, bizarre threats. I thought the exploration of themes like institutional darkness, grief, and finding unexpected connections amidst monstrosity was woven effectively through the visceral horror, which is characteristic of their thematic depth.

As expected with Khaw's writing, the experience requires a tolerance for the intense and the grotesque – the descriptions are unflinching, and the horror often pushes boundaries. But for me, this intensity feels purposeful within the narrative, contributing directly to the unsettling mood and thematic explorations rather than being merely gratuitous.

Overall, "The Library at Hellebore" felt like a concentrated dose of everything that makes Cassandra Khaw's writing so distinct and compelling to me. It's atmospheric, challenging, beautifully written in its dark, visceral way, and leaves that lasting, unsettling impression I associate with their fiction. A fantastic addition, showcasing their unique voice in the horror and dark fantasy genres.

I've gotten really into dark, gothic horror recently and this was kind of like a mix between all the things i've grown to like about the genre. I'm usually disappointed by books in the dark academia genre but this one was honestly a great read. Fantastic mix of adult horror and younger elements of attending a school; overall a really great read! I'll likely pick this up when it comes out :)

Mixed bag on this one. On the one hand, this is deliciously decadent---the horror descriptions are over the top in their goriness and shock value, and the words themselves are rich ("coruscating" "hachured", "cauled with a pink-tinged vernix", etc). But the performative nature of the descriptions and even the vocabulary gets in the way of the plot and characters, leaving them a little less authentic than they could be and taking away from the very real and relevant aspects the author tackles---what it means to have control over our bodies and our futures, responsible uses of power, the ways that society manipulates, the nature of evil.

Well, what a deceptively beautiful cover for a nauseating book! I had to DNF this after I realized this is WAYYYYYY more visceral horror than dark academia fantasy. As one reviewer previously stated, there is near constant graphic violence/body horror. To be fair: based on the synopsis, I anticipated some graphic scenes, but this was another level. Thank you, NetGalley, for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book!

I did not finish this book, nor do I think that I ever will. As you start reading, the author throws you right into action of something that feels like it would normally be the middle of the story and gives very little explanation as to what is actually happening. All the descriptions are very spotty and don't help you imagine or understand the things happening on paper, and the whole thing is written in what I can only describe as TikTok style. I feel like it's supposed to shock with the amount of violence and gore thrown at the reader, but the writing is so flat and emotionally detached that I could not care less about any of the characters or the plot as a whole.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. I really hoped it would be something like A Deadly Education, but The Library at Hellebore lacks in every department.

Come for the body horror, stay for the revolutionary spirit. Things at school can be tough. Your roommate thinks you like her boyfriend, your friend won't shut up about her sorority, and sometimes the faculty's desire for flesh coincides inconveniently with graduation. What's a kidnapped, devil-touched girl to do? Flee to the library, of course! Hermione would be thrilled.

I felt like I had been plopped right into the middle of a story about which I knew nothing. I couldn't finish because it was hard to understand what was going on with this story. I think we have readers who will enjoy this book, but it is not my cup of tea.

Perfect for fans of A Deadly Education, this book was the perfect mix of haunted, gothic, twisty, horror, gore, and so much more!

I think in many ways Cassandra Khaw books should be their own separate sub genre. Her writing is so beautiful and visceral and unique and I really don’t think anyone is doing it like she is. With that being said, I think this book should’ve been marketed differently. I worry people will go into it expecting/wanting typical dark academia and be a bit confused. I knew somewhat what I was getting into and I was still a bit disappointed by the lack of academia. But I think I’ll be thinking about this book for awhile.