Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent is the second installment of a (currently unfinished) trilogy. When I say I’m salivating waiting for the final book, I’m not exaggerating.

I. Can’t. Wait. 

If you don’t already know, it’s called Dead Beat and should be dropping towards the end of 2026 (date tbc).

And I blame Bookstagram and Booktok for this insatiable obsession, because it never would have occurred to me to read this series if not for the overwhelming hype on social media.

I’m actually crushed to have discovered Bardugo intended this to be a series of twelve novels, but ultimately decided to limit it to a trilogy due to the extremely high levels of research required for each book.

Having recently started penning my own Dark Academia novel, and seen the depth of her writing in these books, I can well understand how they would.

Still. The thought we could have had more Alex Stern and Darlington, and won’t, is quietly devastating. 

Ninth House gave us a descent. Into Yale. Into institutional rot. Into a version of hell that wears prestige like a well-cut suit and files its atrocities under ‘tradition’. If you want my full thoughts on that novel, I suggest you read my dissection of it. 

If you’ve not read these books yet, I recommend you pause here. At the very least, read Ninth House before reading on. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers for Hell Bent, but this discussion does discuss details of the book and there are spoilers ahead.

It inevitably spoils Ninth House quite extensively. 

Sure you want to read on?

Good.

Ninth House ended exactly where it needed to: with Darlington gone, Alex standing at the edge of something far worse than ignorance, and the uneasy knowledge that survival is not the same as escape. Hell Bent picks up from that fracture point and cracks it wider. 

This is not a recovery story. 

It’s not a triumph. 

It’s an inversion, a retrieval, and a reckoning with what it actually costs to journey to hell for someone you love. 

The Inverted Descent

Hell Bent literally sends Alex Stern into the underworld. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.

Literally.

Bardugo structures the novel as a deliberate inversion of Dante’s Inferno. Alex becomes a reluctant Dante-figure, while Darlington, once her guide, occupies the fractured space Virgil once held. The references aren’t subtle, but they are precise. Botticelli’s Chart of Hell is explicitly invoked, mapping descent as something architectural, navigable, and brutally ordered rather than abstract or mythic.

But where Dante is guided by a steady, authoritative hand, Hell Bent gives us something far more unstable.

Instead of a poet led by a living sage, we have a survivor chasing the escaped soul of her dead guide. The descent doesn’t promise understanding. It promises damage.

At the end of Ninth House, Alex and Dawes commit to an act that feels both unhinged and inevitable: stealing a soul out of Hell. Not as a noble quest, not as divine justice, but as an act of stubborn, furious refusal. Bardugo has been clear that this journey isn’t just about retrieval, but about forcing Alex to confront the limits of her own power and the lie that endurance equals invincibility.

In other words, Hell Bent uses Dante’s structure to dismantle Dante’s fantasy: the idea that descent is survivable if you’re clever enough, pure enough, or guided well enough.

The Blind Leading The Murderers

The guides in Hell Bent prove fallible. 

In Inferno, Virgil is wise and steady; in Bardugo’s underworld, Darlington’s guidance has fatal limits. Darlington was effectively trapped in Hell before the first book’s timeline. We spent the entirety of Ninth House learning what happened to him, from his own perspective of events, and from Alex and Lethe’s efforts to find and save him after the fact. 

The novel ends with the unsettling yet darkly hopeful realisation that Darlington isn’t dead.

He’s in hell.

He wasn’t killed. 

He was devoured.

And as Alex comes to realise, he somehow, miraculously, survived. But to do so, he became something far darker.

Darlington transformed into a demon. A process that can only be achieved by murderers, and the concept of how many different ways a person can become a murderer is deeply explored in Hell Bent. 

To a surprising degree. 

There is a very loose definition at play here, and as we see in order for your soul to be marked as one who has killed another, you need not cold bloodedly do away with an enemy. It might be an accident. An act of mercy. Of self defence. Or not even your own act at all, but simply your refusal to do anything to prevent it from happening.

Virgil has gone from being the guide leading his Dante through the mysteries of Lethe, to becoming one of the damned, trapped in the inferno and desperate for Alex to lead him out.

And that’s just so fucking delicious. 

The Price Of Saving A Soul

The inversion of the Virgil/Dante dynamic radically reshapes the moral stakes of the story. Alex can retrieve Darlington, but she cannot restore him. 

Hell Bent is explicit about this: survival is not healing, and rescue is not redemption. 

The cost of descent doesn’t disappear just because someone makes it back.

Bardugo sharpens this further by refusing Alex the fantasy of solitary heroism. The retrieval is only possible through collective effort. Alex needs Dawes. She needs Mercy. She needs Turner. The book dismantles the lone-genius myth with surgical intent, insisting that descent is communal, messy, and dependent on people who can fail you.

And all of this unfolds within a Yale that has fully dropped the pretence of neutrality.

In Hell Bent, institutional power becomes overtly diabolical. The secret societies don’t merely skirt corruption; they trade directly with demons. Prestige is converted into currency. Wealth is extracted through ritualised harm. The bargains are efficient, legalistic, and catastrophically indifferent to who gets crushed beneath them.

Magic, here, is not wonder. It’s infrastructure.

Alex’s tuition-free place at Yale isn’t a blessing. It’s a tether. Her proximity to power binds her more tightly to the very system she recognises as rotten. The Gauntlet, a literal staircase into Hell engineered by the societies, becomes the perfect symbol of this world: a sanctioned path to power that demands sacrifice, obedience, and blood, all while pretending to be a meritocratic trial.

Hell Bent doesn’t offer dark academia as escape. It offers it as exposure.

Magic doesn’t elevate the institution. It reveals it.

Galaxy Stern Is Facing Her Demons (Literally)

Galaxy Stern emerges from Hell Bent battered but unbroken. The novel deepens the arc that began with Darlington’s disappearance and forced her to finally confront her demons. She’s been through brutal trauma in her life (gang violence, addiction, grief over Hellie’s death), and Hell Bent refuses to give her easy healing. 

And that’s right.

That’s necessary.

As Bardugo herself puts it, “trauma is [not] something that you get over in the space of 400 pages”. After everything Alex has been through, to suppose she could simply shrug it off after a few weeks, or even months of self-reflection and growth is ridiculous. It would undermine her whole character.

And she is such a phenomenal character.

Slightly savage, sharp, far more intelligent than she gives herself credit for. Deeply flawed. Deeply human. And despite the emotional growth we saw in Ninth House she’s still very much haunted, and absolutely furious. 

Throughout Hell Bent, Alex is determined, resilient, slightly ferocious, fiercely protective of her growing circle, and willing to sacrifice everything for them, including her life.

Even her soul.

Much of this is trauma processing. 

Alex lost Helle in the most brutal way possible, and carries an endless amount of guilt for it. To think she might in some way balance the scales by saving others is doubtless partially at play. At the same time, trauma gives us an unhealthy tendency to flirt with danger. There’s an inherent numbness that many experience for months, often years after the event, and the urge to feel something, anything, while simultaneously having zero regard for your own safety is an incredibly dangerous combination.

Alex spent Ninth House running from the ghosts of her past. In Hell Bent, she’s still haunted, but instead of running she’s turned to talk, and forced to listen to their taunts and accusations. Meanwhile, she’s facing down her demons, with the demonic presence of Darlington and the need to journey to the pits of hell to save him a very literal representation of this. 

The narrative tension turns on Alex learning that her rage and fear can’t simply be exorcised. It’s not as simple as acknowledging a thing happened, gaining some kind of closure from that acceptance, and moving on. Trauma loops, endlessly. And Alex spends much of Hell Bent wrestling with the fact she’s still irrevocably entwined with grief and memory of Helle’s death and everything that happened that night.

By book’s end, Alex is more powerful and more in control of her abilities. But the emotional debt of her trauma has not fully paid.

She isn’t magically healed by the end of it. And the book is so much stronger for that.

Darling Darlington Is A Golden God (Well, Demon)

Darlington’s arc makes the moral cost personal. In Ninth House, Darlington was the infallible mentor – patient, scholarly, slightly otherworldly. He carried a quiet dignity, and a soul that was, in its own way, just as haunted and traumatised as Alex’s, albeit by very different means.

Darlington’s return isn’t framed as a victory. It’s framed as a consequence.

He is alive, yes. But he is not restored. Whatever Hell did to him didn’t stop when he crossed back over. It clings. It leaks. It alters how he moves through the world, how he sees himself, and how others see him in return. 

Hell Bent is relentless about this. 

Darlington isn’t punished for hubris or curiosity in any neat moral sense. He’s damaged because damage is what happens when institutions, magic, and power treat human beings as expendable.

He came back from hell with a hitchhiker, but Golgarot isn’t just a demon riding in his body. 

He’s the embodiment of what Darlington was always vulnerable to: devotion without skepticism, reverence without resistance, a willingness to believe that if you follow the rules closely enough, the system will protect you. 

Hell simply made that flaw literal.

What’s particularly cruel, and particularly effective, is that Darlington understands this.

He knows what he’s become. 

He knows the cost Alex paid to retrieve him. 

He knows that her act of loyalty has tethered her even more tightly to a world that will happily consume her next. His gratitude is real, but so is his guilt. And Hell Bent refuses to allow that guilt to resolve into redemption. 

There is no moment where Darlington’s suffering becomes narratively useful enough to cleanse him.

Instead, the book forces him to live with it.

This is where Hell Bent sharpens its blade compared to Ninth House. The first book dismantled the idea that institutions protect the deserving. The second dismantles the idea that love, loyalty, or sacrifice can fix what those institutions break. 

Darlington’s survival doesn’t absolve anyone. 

Not him. Not Alex. Not Lethe. Not Yale.

And Alex feels this acutely.

Saving Darlington doesn’t give her relief. It gives her responsibility. She doesn’t get to put him back on the pedestal he once occupied, because Hell Bent has exposed that pedestal as part of the problem. 

Darlington can no longer be her moral north star, her scholarly ideal, or her proof that goodness survives proximity to power. 

He’s something else now. Someone else.

Someone she has to reckon with, rather than rely on.

This reframes their bond in a way that’s far more interesting than romance would ever be (though I am hopeful the slow burn between them has an eventual payoff in the next book!). What exists between them is a kind of yearning, but not for what could be between them if they can save him, or what might have been had things been different.

It’s grief for what was, loyalty to what remains, and the quiet terror of knowing that sometimes saving someone just means you’re both stuck living with the aftermath together.

Hell Bent doesn’t romanticise that. It doesn’t soften it. It doesn’t reward it.

It simply insists on its truth.

Darlington’s arc, like Alex’s, becomes a study in survival without sanctification. He lives. He functions. He even helps. But Hell has marked him, and the novel is brave enough to let that mark stand. In doing so, Bardugo drives home one of Hell Bent’s most uncomfortable conclusions:

Some journeys change you in ways that love cannot undo.

Some rescues cost more than they save.

And sometimes the most honest thing a story can do is refuse to pretend otherwise.

The Worldbuilding Of Lethe’s Yale

The worldbuilding in Hell Bent is not designed to comfort. It’s designed to expose.

What Bardugo expands in this sequel isn’t the scope of Yale’s control, but the fragility of it. Every new layer of the occult world Alex encounters sharpens the same accusation first levelled in Ninth House: institutions don’t merely allow harm, they normalise it, depend on it, and quietly benefit from pretending it’s contained.

Yale’s magic-infused infrastructure is revealed not as a system of mastery, but as a liability field. Lethe operates on the belief that the supernatural can be categorised, regulated, and rendered safe through ritual and protocol. Hell Bent systematically dismantles that belief. What exists beneath the campus isn’t an ordered hierarchy of power, but a series of dangerous thresholds Yale only partially understands and cannot fully control.

The Gauntlet is the clearest expression of this arrogance. A secret, sanctioned descent into Hell, it masquerades as a trial of worth while functioning as an act of catastrophic hubris. It is not a test of merit. It is a gamble dressed up as tradition, engineered by people willing to risk lives for access to power they believe they deserve. 

Golgarot, bound into this architecture, is not an anomaly in the system. He is the consequence of it.

Rather than expanding Lethe’s authority, Hell Bent exposes its limits. The appearance of beings and forces Lethe does not anticipate or understand isn’t a sign of a deeper system at work, but proof that the system is incomplete. 

Yale’s greatest danger isn’t corruption alone. It’s the certainty that corruption is manageable.

Alex’s role as a Wheelwalker sits at the centre of this revelation. Her ability to navigate thresholds doesn’t elevate her within the institution. It marks her as useful. Expendable. Her gift binds her more tightly to Yale’s most dangerous spaces, not because she seeks them, but because the institution has learned to rely on her proximity to risk.

Nothing in Hell Bent offers escape through magic. The supernatural doesn’t provide refuge, wonder, or transcendence. It reveals the machinery beneath prestige and power, showing how quickly mystery becomes infrastructure, and how easily violence disappears once it’s processed through ritual, hierarchy, and tradition.

This isn’t fantasy as refuge.

It’s fantasy as exposure.

The UnRomance Of Hell Bent

While I’m an absolute sucker for a dark academia romance novel, Hell Bent is not it. Nor was Ninth House. They are phenomenal as dark academia novels, but while it is emotional intimacy that shapes Hell Bent, there’s a notable absence of any conventional romance. 

Alex never gains a lover or a destined partner. Instead, Bardugo foregrounds found family and loyalty as the stakes that drive her. Alex’s devotion to Darlington, to Hellie’s memory, and her growing bonds with Dawes, Mercy, and Turner, are the heart of the story. While there is a romantic frisson between her and Darlington that suggests something could possibly develop there at some point, she’s not motivated to save him by romantic love.

But simply love.

Alex is such a damaged, dysfunctional, edgy little loner, there’s something almost shocking about her ability to draw people to her and forge them into a little ride-or-die coven, happy to follow her into hell.

Literally.

I love found family at the best of times but this is the best kind.  

Alex is driven by a fierce, almost pathological protectiveness. Dawes was a predictable ally, yet it’s still delightful to watch their friendship develop. Mercy also steps up in this novel as a very unlikely but devoted mystical wing woman, despite having zero official ties to Lethe or magical ability of her own. Even Tripp becomes a loyal companion, drawn in by Alex’s determination. 

And then of course, there’s Darlington. In all his naked, demonic, erect, golden glory.

Hell Bent’s stakes are entirely emotional. Every threat is leveled again a member of Alex’s chosen family, and it really hits home. The ties between Alex, Darlington, and their various friends and allies are complex, and much of the novel is a mental maze of trying to untangle everyone’s hopes, fears, desires, and motives. 

There may be no romance subplot in these novels, but there is so much yearning, and it all comes from the interpersonal bonds between the characters. 

We Don’t Get An Easy Catharsis

Hell Bent does not reward endurance with absolution.

By the end of the novel, survival has occurred. The immediate threat is contained. The portal is closed. But salvation remains deliberately out of reach. Darlington lives, but he is not restored. Alex survives, but she is not healed. The damage doesn’t evaporate simply because the worst has passed.

That refusal matters.

Bardugo is not interested in trauma as a narrative obstacle that can be overcome with grit, loyalty, or love. Trauma, here, is cumulative. It lingers. It reshapes the people who carry it, and it does not ask permission before resurfacing. Alex’s survival is not framed as victory, but as persistence. The choice to keep going in a world that has already proven itself hostile.

The novel makes a quiet but radical distinction: survival is not the same thing as redemption. Making it back from Hell does not mean you leave Hell behind.

Alex’s willingness to sacrifice herself to close the Gauntlet is not a cleansing act. It’s a continuation of a pattern the book refuses to romanticise: her tendency to offer herself up as collateral in systems that are more than happy to take her. What changes is not her instinct to endure, but her growing awareness of what that endurance costs.

The final impression Hell Bent leaves is not hope in the traditional sense. It’s vigilance. The sense that the world remains dangerous, that the structures which enabled the descent still exist, and that surviving them once does not confer immunity.

Rescue, the novel suggests, is not about resolution.

It’s about staying alive long enough to choose again.

Hell Bent vs. Ninth House: Same Roots, New Depths

Hell Bent doesn’t redefine what Ninth House began. It stresses it.

Where Ninth House exposed the machinery of institutional power, Hell Bent asks what happens after that knowledge becomes inescapable. The mystery gives way to consequence. The descent becomes a retrieval. And the fantasy of escape is replaced with the far harsher reality of aftermath.

The scope widens, the tone darkens, and the moral questions sharpen. But the through-line remains the same: power corrupts, institutions protect themselves, and survival inside those systems is not the same thing as winning.

Alex Stern remains exactly who she has always been: sharp, furious, damaged, and stubbornly alive. What changes is not her world, but her understanding of it. Hell Bent forces her, and the reader, to sit with the fact that some systems cannot be fixed. Only navigated. Only endured.

In that sense, Hell Bent is not escalation for its own sake. It’s a deepening. A second descent that strips away the last comforting illusions Ninth House left intact.

It doesn’t offer salvation.

It offers clarity.

And it begs the inevitable question: how will this end?

Will it end?

Or are these beautiful, damaged, damned characters doomed to descend again, and again, and again, as the world devours them endlessly.

I closed this novel with the immediate impulse to go back to the beginning and start it all over again.

And that left me with the eerie notion that readers are nothing more than hell beasts devouring characters and dragging them into the inferno, doomed to repeat their greatest sorrows, highs, defeats, and victories, loves and losses, over and over and over again.