Review by Booklist Review
After the onset of her magical powers and the subsequent, well-deserved but gruesome murder of her predator stepfather, Alessa is forcibly enrolled at the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted, where she's told she will be redeemed. Yet the only thing Hellebore's strange faculty teach is survival of the fittest, and with a student body where everyone has "the potential to destroy the world three times over," it's a daily battle, culminating in literal slaughter at graduation, when the faculty transform and eat the students. Alessa and seven others take refuge in the library, where they should attempt to overcome their animosity to survive. Unfortunately, they're also monsters, and the library is Hellebore's most dangerous location. Sardonic, standoffish Alessa is the perfect antihero for this academic bloodbath, capable of just enough reluctant compassion to balance her earth-shattering rage. Khaw's (The Salt Grows Heavy, 2023) gorgeous prose is a visceral symphony of body horror, encompassing nightmarish transformations, cosmically horrific beings, and fascinating lore about this world's underexplored pantheon of gods and creatures. A treat for the darkest fans of dark academia.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Khaw (The Salt Grows Heavy) delivers a shockingly gory and not entirely successful take on dark academia set at the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted, a school for those with magical abilities. In an alternate universe in which magic has returned to the world after disappearing during the Renaissance, the government requires anyone presenting magical abilities to be rounded up and "educated" at places like Hellebore, which is no Hogwartsesque center of wholesome magical learning. Alternating between chapters labeled "Before," in which protagonist Alessa first arrives at the school, and those that take place in the present, when the teachers have revealed themselves to be bloodthirsty monsters intent upon feeding on the students, Alessa details the callous, bloody, and confounding nature of the school. Due to this alternating timeline, as well as the incomprehensibility intrinsic to the surreal workings of Hellebore itself, it can be hard to grasp the rules, norms, and limitations guiding this world, which makes the stakes uncertain. The characters, too, are difficult to parse: Alessa is a typical rebellious, sarcastic, young-adult heroine, but her relationships with her classmates--and theirs with each other--shift uncertainly from scene to scene. The result is messy, both literally and figuratively. Agent: Michael Curry, Donald Maass Literary. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
What happens when students at a school for the paranormal decide that enough is enough? Best known for video games, queer horror, and a collaboration with Richard Kadrey (The Dead Take the A Train, 2023), Khaw detours to visit an elite school and the damaged young adults it serves. At 21, Alessa Li wakes up with a start to find she's been kidnapped from home in Montreal and apparently enrolled in college, simply because she's incredibly dangerous. In fact, the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted is less an homage to Hogwarts than a gory rebuttal dressed in wizard's robes. The story moves between two timelines; the first offers Alessa's introduction to her creepy classmates, while the second finds them all under siege later in the titular library. "Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty's interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over," Alessa explains. Among the 20-odd students, cult member Portia transmogrifies into some kind of insectoid critter every now and then; Eoan sacrifices himself by feeding his own body to the school's ravenous hosts in order to protect his friends; Delilah is an "immortal sacrifice," dying over and over again in the service of the gods; while Rowan is a "deathworker" whose destiny is foretold by prophecy. There are some intriguing elements--and it's often hard to take. Like other postmodern antiheroines, among them Chuck Wendig's Miriam Black (Blackbirds, 2015, etc.) and Julie Crews fromThe Dead Take the A Train, Alessa's primary operating mode is pretty much caustic bitch, and her classmates don't temper it much. Whether the deadpan violence and body horror is excessive is a matter of personal taste, but there's no denying that the whole thing is pretty squelchy and it's not always easy to follow. Proceed with caution. A secret history that toys with the mythos of dark academia while reveling in its excesses. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
