REVIEW: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
There’s dark academia, and then there’s The Library at Hellebore, the latest dark fantasy horror from the mind of two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Cassandra Khaw. Modern fantasy literature is rife with magic schools, but none as grim or as brutally dark as Khaw’s Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted.
The Hellebore student body consists of world-eaters and apocalypse-makers known, respectively, as Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks. With a campus environment like that, it’s no wonder that the primary means of student recruitment is through abduction.
Although Hellebore promises its students a normal life after graduation, the school harbors a much darker secret: on graduation day, the faculty embark on a hungry rampage, feasting ravenously upon their students. A small group of students escape to the school library, forced to work together if they want any hope of survival. However, the sanctuary of the library proves to be short-lived.
The ensemble cast is led by Alessa Li, the first-person narrator of the novel who, like many of her peers, was kidnapped and forcibly enrolled at Hellebore. Alessa’s narration shifts back and forth through time, building suspense while creating a disorienting feel that deepens the unsettled mood of The Library at Hellebore.
As someone who is usually left unsatisfied by the dark academia aesthetic, I appreciate how Cassandra Khaw cranks the darkness nob to its pitch-black setting and then splatters it with blood and a heavy dose of entrails.
Cassandra Khaw’s prose in The Library at Hellebore is their best since The Salt Grows Heavy, a darkly beautiful nightmare of a novella that weds Han Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid with a cannibalistic apocalypse. While The Salt Grows Heavy reads like a hallucinatory nightmare, The Library at Hellebore feels more grounded in its vision of unforgiving horror.
The Library at Hellebore packs a surprising amount of nuance for a body horror, a subgenre that I wouldn’t normally associate with subtlety. Cassandra Khaw also makes effective use of unreliable narration, building up to a conclusion that left me floored and speechless.
Altogether, The Library at Hellebore’s marriage of dark academia and body horror delivers just the right balance of physical gore and psychological dread. Cassandra Khaw blurs the line between the monstrous and the humane, while delivering a gut punch of a story that serves as an allegory of survival in a world of pain. The Library at Hellebore is highly recommended for readers looking for a new twist on grimdark.
Read The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra KhawThe post REVIEW: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.
