The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

I love going to author panels at conventions. I will go because I like one of the authors and after listening to all of them talk for an hour, I usually have put a bunch of new books on hold at the library because I’m so intrigued by what I have heard from the new-to-me authors.

I first encountered Cassandra Khaw at a panel at NYCC a few years ago and I thought they seemed really cool. I realized that they had written for one of my favorite D&D sourcebooks, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, so I decided to check out their fiction. I thought their novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth was creepy and interesting, but I really bounced off The Dead Take the A Train, a novel they cowrote with Richard Kadrey (which did not live up to the specific premise in the title, among other issues I had with it).

I was intrigued when the publisher and NetGalley gave me an eARC of her new book in exchange for an honest review. The Library at Hellebore was billed as dark academia, but after recently reading the Scholomance trilogy and Incandescent, this book just felt like warmed over tropes poorly executed with an excess of gore for gore’s sake. The characters were too unlikable and I didn’t care about the plot. This book was not for me.

I don't think I've ever been let down by a Cassandra Khaw title and this was no exception. Great writing and atmosphere with complex and interesting characters, though I think the time aspects of it may be unappealing to some readers. It didn't bother me, but it reads in a way that I think could be easy to lose track of. Beware of gore and body horror!

Hellebore Institute is a brutal, dangerous college for housing and controlling brutal, dangerous people. Alessa, a young woman with more control over human bodies than she ought to have, was kidnapped and brought here after being deemed too dangerous for the outside world when she killed her stepfather. Hellebore is just one more place to escape, but the longer it goes on, the more it seems that graduation really is the only way through. And then graduation comes and the faculty starts eating the graduating class. Alessa, along with six various classmates, all deadly in their own ways, hide in the library, where they receive the message that they have three days, and if there is just one survivor standing at the end, that survivor will get to go free. All seven are desperate to survive, but maybe none more than Alessa. Shut in with the antichrist, a boy whose touch kills and who she cares about too much, a young woman that she's strangely drawn to and who's packing quite a secret, a very sad cafeteria worker, a nonbinary siren of a southern belle, a seer, and a fungal being, and that's not even counting the Librarian hunting them, Alessa has her work cut out for her.
This book was nasty. Very gory, many people get eaten, absolutely foul. I enjoyed this nasty book so much. This brings dark academia to a whole new place of darkness. My big piece of advice is not to get attached to the characters. Tragically, my warning is that you will get attached to the characters. The worldbuilding was so weird, and at times things were hard to follow, but once you're into the story, you can't stop.

Natalie Naudus was the best part of this audiobook, which I could not finish.

As a fan of The Scholomance series, this felt like a really horrible stylized take on it. The time jumping between chapters made the story incredibly hard to follow and none of what was happening made sense anyway. Why were they all like that? What was the point of anything? It felt like a series of body horror vignettes.

This is a very, very gory book, so if that turns you off, then it is not for you. It is also an incredible work of fiction that gets you into it and keeps you reading. All the different characters and their various lore were so interesting that I could have read whole novels about each of them. I really loved this book and the deeply unsettling body horror, and existential horror that it contained.

I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

This was my first book by Cassandra and it won't be my last. This book kept me wanting to find out what was going to happen. I loved the writing style even though I was delightfully confused most of the book.

Hellebore had a stunning cover and intriguing premise, but I just could not connect to it. I think I may have just not been the ideal reader for this story. I can see how fans of fantasy/monster type stories would love this one! Definitely check it out if those genres appeal to you.,

Included it in my fantasy to read in 2025 list. Loved the dark academia and magic of this and frankly, the deluxe packaging is gorgeous. I love Khaw's voice and it's exciting to watch them grow as an author.

I can see where khaw was going with this story, but it didn’t land for me like I hoped it would. The premise is unique and had high hopes, but as the story went on, I ended up just being confused.

I really wanted to like this book, and I may come back to it in the future. However, while reading it, it reminded me of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy so much that I just ended up wanting to re-read that instead. Which I did, and now I don't have any desire to return to The Library at Hellebore. I'm 90% sure I'll try again later, but for now, it's a DNF.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was weird! I loved it. It was weird and gross but oddly touching at moments? I annotated so much in this book. It had so many quotes that I loved. This book is about a girl who is kidnapped and forcibly enrolled in a school with world enders and antichrists and parasites (to name a few) under the premise that they will "fix" her so she can live a normal life in society. In reality our MC and her classmates are to be meals for the immortal beings that run the school. When the faculty attacks they escape to the library but they're not out of danger yet. There's only one way in and out of the library and a hungry librarian wandering the stacks. They also have to worry about each other and who will be sacrificed to the hungry faculty for the good of the group. This book does switch back in forth in time; some chapters are labelled simply "Before" whereas others are labelled as Day One or Two etc. The back and forth is a little confusing because we start the book at the middle of the ending and then the story is sewn together from there past and present in no discernable pattern throughout the book until we finally reach the end. I enjoyed the disjointed-ness of the chapters, it kept me questioning what was happening and trying to solve the book like a complex puzzle. I also really enjoyed the use of imagery in the writing, particularly of the fig and the wasp. I highly recommend this book to lovers of horror, weird books, and gore.

DNF. Story is very confusing, jumping around for no reason, and this the story made little sense. Writing was also not engaging,

The Library at Hellebore is dark academia at its most sinister—chilling, brilliant, and utterly addictive. Cassandra Khaw crafts a nightmarish academy filled with power, betrayal, and monstrous secrets that will keep you turning pages long into the night. Twisted, atmospheric, and unforgettable, this is a must-read for fans of horror-tinged fantasy who crave something deliciously diabolical.

This book has beautiful writing and body horror galore, two things I very much appreciated from the story! Unfortunately, I can't rate it above a 3 star for the simple fact that I didn't feel anything for any of the characters, which diluted the horror of their situation for me.

This book is one that throws you right into the action immediately and expects you to keep up as it immerses you in the Academy of Hellebore without even a hello there. This style of writing is usually one I love, but in this instance I felt it was to the detriment of the story. The back and forth between present horror and past lead up to the events made it difficult for me to get a feel for any of the characters, and because I couldn't connect with them at all, I felt distanced from the things happening to them and that dampened the horror I should have been feeling.

I truly feel like this is a book that could have benefitted from a more linear timeline after the initial chapter.

That said, Khaw certainly has a way with words and the descriptions of all the body horror especially were very visceral which is exactly the kind of thing you would want from this sort of horror novel. While this one wasn't necessary a hit for me, I'll certainly pick up more from Khaw in the future.

Would recommend to anyone who read Novik's 'A Deadly Education' and finished it wishing it had leaned much harder into the descriptive horror.

This is by far my favorite Khaw book. It takes the body horror of something like "Hell Followed With Us" and combines it with the dark school of " A Deadly Education". It is one I will likely read again and again to keep picking away at all the details in the plot. Brilliantly written!

I did not love The Salt Grows Heavy, but I was pleasantly surprised with this one! I really enjoyed the dark academia horror. I love the magical school trope. I think this might become her most popular book yet. Definitely recommend! The prose was captivating and the plot fast-paced. If you don't like graphic gore, this may not be for you.

A non-linear tale of cosmic horror, The Library of Hellebore is a phenomenally grotesque tale of survival. When Alessa was forcefully enrolled into the Hellebore Institute, she was promised freedom after graduation. But when the day arrives, the faculty coalesce into a monstrous being and proceed to eat the students. To escape the faculty, Alessa along with her classmates seek refuge in the school’s library where they try to work together to survive. The Library of Hellebore was one of the most disgusting books I have ever read, and I mean that in a positive way. Cassandra Khaw’s depictions of body gore and violence was so strong, I couldn’t eat a snack while reading it. I do think that the prose was overwritten, especially in the beginning. This was clearly a stylistic choice to cultivate a dark-academic tone but was over-the-top, in my opinion. I would recommend this for anyone in the mood for a gnarly, monstrous horror novel.

📚THE LIBRARY AT HELLEBORE🩸by @casskhaw is surely the darkest and most brutal dark academia title I have read. Thank you to the author, @netgalley and the publishers @tornightfire and @macmillan.audio for the e and audio-ARCs and the finished copy.

"When you've had your every freedom pared from you, you learn to hoard the manner and time and method of your death. It becomes the only thing that is really yours."

Allessa has been kidnapped. Why? Well, when magic started to find its way back into the human population about 100 years ago, it first collapsed society and then the powers at be harnessed the capital of it all, imposing rules, restrictions and laws for the magically afflicted to obey. One of the ways they control magic is to snatch up young magic weilders and stuff them into a school together to corral them. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is one of those schools - full of gods and monsters, anti-christs and ragnaroks.They also have a pesky habit of kidnapping their enrollees. So here is Allessa, trapped at Hellebore with other magical degenerates, hiding in the library from her cannabilistic teaching staff as they stalk her and her fellow classmates in a frenzy of cosmic horror. Let the graduation ceremony begin.

Oh boy, I was not entirely ready for this title but I absolutely loved it just the same. This story is not for the faint of heart and has Khaw's signature dark atmosphere married with witty ennui. I loved watching the budding relationships between classmates as they learned to trust each other and play to each others strengths. The descriptions of were wild and honestly a bit reminiscent of a much darker, more dangerous Hogwarts.

Here are some themes to expect:
🩸Darkly delicious
💀Grotesque and brutal descriptions
🩸Found family
💀Teachers vs Students (a la The Faculty)
🩸Dramatic and desperate for survival

When your school crest is composed of figs, wasps, and carnivorous deer, you know you’re in for an interesting school year… If anyone has the aesthetics of horror down, it’s Cassandra Khaw, who broke into the genre back in 2021 with Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I had the pleasure of interviewing Khaw before that book’s release to get their thoughts on hauntings and horror novellas. Now Khaw is trying their hand at dark academia with The Library at Hellebore, which came out just last week. If you’re craving more books about magically powerful young adults at deadly schools after finishing Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, then you’ll definitely want to check this one out!

Alessa Li never wanted to enroll at Hellebore. But with the magical ability to unravel anyone from the inside and string their guts from the rafters with only a twitch of her thoughts, Alessa is given no choice but to become a boarder at the premier school for anti-Christs, world-eaters, and anyone else with apocalypse-level powers. Among her classmates are a literal son of Lucifer, a boy infested by cicada gods, and an unassuming individual who speaks with a voice like the one that spoke the world into creation. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted offers them all salvation and purpose if they can learn to rein their powers into productivity within its halls. But as Alessa’s escape attempts fail and she and her peers are faced with graduation, she realizes Hellebore never intended to let them go. Khaw cleverly divides the narrative into before and after the fateful events of graduation day and alternates between the two timelines in order to slowly reveal the truth about the school, its faculty, and its most dangerous pupils.

The Library at Hellebore takes a particularly interesting approach to the concepts of friendship, morality, and what we owe each other and ourselves. “Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive” is a motto repeated by multiple characters throughout the book. Alessa is, by her own admission, not a good person. And as the reality show cliché goes, she is not here to make friends. She has brutally killed several people before her enrollment at Hellebore and will kill several more before the story’s end. She is rude and brusque to most of her peers and has no desire to explain her actions and present herself in a better light. Nonetheless, though she often dismisses them as naive, she feels a certain admiration for her classmates who approach the world with kindness, friendliness, and altruism. She feels obligated to help and protect others who have treated her well, and this feeling is amplified for those she views as being inherently good people. And at the end of the day, no matter how broken and dangerous she believes herself to be, there are lines Alessa won’t cross. She is disgusted by those who revel in causing harm and who target innocents. Alessa has a strong sense of justice, which—in a brutally unjust world—easily morphs into an urge for vengeance.

For a dark academia novel, though, I will say that there is not much in the way of academics going on at Hellebore. The students attend classes every day, but they aren’t learning much. The classes are assigned randomly, with no connection to the students’ interests or abilities. The teachers are oddly inhuman and they seem to be motivated by something other than a love for imparting knowledge. And don’t even get started on the library, which does all in its power to prevent students from accessing books. Even those who—unlike Alessa—fully devote themselves to their studies wind up frustrated that these studies get them no closer to the answers they seek. One might read this as a commentary on the modern education system, building on a line of critique within other dark academia novels (such as Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House) that call out academic institutions for all too often exploiting their most vulnerable students and limiting access to only those already in power. Or, one could just as easily argue that this is simply a horror novel that happens to be set in a school rather than truly engaging in the dark academia literary tradition. Readers will have to judge for themselves.

Whether you’re in it for the dark academia aesthetic or you have a love for morally gray female characters embracing their power, The Library at Hellebore is a fun, if bloody, read.