I've only read one Cassandra Khaw thus far, the polarising 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth', though I do have a collaborative novel on my TBR shelves ready to go. Many readers love that novella, with its poetic language and immersive setting. Many readers hate it, considering the vocabulary to be daunting and the characters unsympathetic. I found myself acknowledging both sides, ending up a lot closer to love than hate, and looked forward to another Khaw book. That turned out to be this and I can see both camps coming out to play again.

It's a longer story, running full novel-length, and the genre is ostensibly dark academia, a big deal in fantasy nowadays. That's appropriate but perhaps a little misleading. This isn't merely dark, it's full-on Lovecraftian abyss, placing the book firmly at the body horror end of dark fantasy. I haven't got a problem with that! However, the academia promised by the setting is mostly absent, as this story works around it rather than through it. Anyone wanting to immerse themselves in the detail of how the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted works will be disappointed.

I found the language just as beautiful but a little less daunting than previously. While there were a handful of words that were new to me, this shouldn't send anyone with a good vocabulary to the dictionary very often, and, crucially, even words that I didn't know were clear in context. That was not the case in 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth', especially when it came to references to Japanese culture. Khaw merely uses a poetic touch to place the right word in the right place, with a strong first line—"When I woke up, my roommate, Johanna, was dead."—and at least four glorious uses of vocabulary on the first page: "soaked in effluvium", "soup of viscera", "one desolate limb" and "dead rat's rotten hugs". There are many more to come, of course.

The narrator of that first line is Alessa Li and she tells us this story. My biggest problem with that prior novella was that none of the characters were at all sympathetic, so I found myself siding with the house that wanted to kill one of them. I wondered if I'd have the same problem here, because this school is inherently designed to contain the worst of the worst. Rather oddly, I didn't, mostly because, whatever dark talents these students might have, they're still the underdogs facing off against the even darker faculty on their graduation night. I felt for a lot of them, even though I'd prefer to not be in the same city as any of them in real life.

That's because Hellebore is less of a school and more of an otherworldly prison masquerading as a school. There's a headmaster, who's also a headmistress, and a bunch of teachers who lead classes. Of course, there's the library of the title with its dedicated Librarian and we spend a lot of time in there. However, there's very little of what we might consider school life because this isn't about a mission to educate students, it's about taking the most dangerous people, mostly young adults, in the world and throwing them together under the charge of a faculty that's more dangerous still. While we're in a fantasy version of our world where magic has returned, it doesn't seem likely that these teachers are even human.

We eventually learn why Johanna is dead on the opening page but she's far from the last. Death is routine at Hellebore, to the degree that, when Alessa's class graduates, the faculty merge into an amorphous 'Society'-esque eating machine and devour the valedictorian. Then they turn on every other student present and there are a hundred and seventeen dead before the survivors who are barricaded within the Library don't need to defend any more. Eating your own students isn't your typical business model for a school and, while it's all agreeably nightmarish, it also happens early and the reasons why hung over the rest of the book for me. I don't believe they're ever explained.

While it might seem like that's me spoiling the climax, it isn't. It unfolds by page thirty-eight and the eight survivors barricaded from the ravenous faculty behind the library door "listened as they oiled away, the wet, sticky squelching of their myriad appendages becoming quieter and quieter, until there wasn't anything to listen to except our own thundering hearts." Within five pages, we learn that the headmaster is willing to let one student leave alive. These eight have three days to either kill off the rest or throw them outside to be sacrificed.

Sympathy seems inherent in a situation like this, but these aren't regular students. Many of them enrolled through choice, for a variety of reasons, but Alessa was spirited away in her sleep to wake up in Hellebore as a student. She calls that kidnapping. Then again, she'd murdered her would-be-rapist stepfather by wishing it: "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." And she's easily one of the more human characters here.

For instance, Adam may actually be the Antichrist. Certainly, he's one of Satan's children. Delilah is a Lamb, an immortal sacrifice, killed over and over again but always returning. When one boy threatens Sullivan, he opens his mouth and pours out cicada lords to devour him alive. Ford is an Oracle, who eviscerates himself to examine his own organs and entrails and make predictions out of what he sees. There's a wonderfully grotesque chapter in which Prof. Cartilage holds one of his Abdominal Infrastructure classes in the basement, pouring maggots into Ford's insides to lecture on myiasis. Snapping necks is a mercy in this book to protect from fates much worse.

That may be the only class we actually get to see, except for one Prof. Fleur leads in her garden, a powerful chapter in which her authority backfires on her brutally as everyone present, including us, learns something important about one of the key characters. That's because the many Before chapters are there for us to teach us about the cast rather than the setting. Hellebore is mostly a backdrop, a deliciously grotesque backdrop for sure but still only a backdrop so we can understand what's going on in the Day One and eventually Day Two chapters that alternate with them.

It's a routine suggestion in book reviews that "this book should be a movie" and it's not true quite as often as critics might suggest. While I'd certainly like to see an attempt to see this story, I can't see it being a movie, certainly not one made in Hollywood. They'd assign someone like Tim Burton and he'd make it all cute and quirky so the results would be awful in all the wrong ways. I see this a lot more as an anime, one that would take its time to unfold and develop the backdrop into a far more substantial setting. That's how to maintain the deep mood that Khaw manifests of students literally feeling trapped in a school that wants to kill them, even in the Before chapters. It's also a great way to preserve the body horror elements intact.

I haven't read a lot of dark academia and I'm well aware that this succeeds a lot more on the first half of that subgenre name than the second, but I had a blast with this. It wraps up quickly enough to avoid outstaying its welcome but it takes long enough to work as survival horror, merely in an academic setting. The mood is lush and I appreciated how Khaw dipped not only into body horror, describing every glistening orifice and entrail, but also into Lovecraftian territory, where much is left vague because it simply can't be described. The combination of those two approaches builds a good deal of the mood and the unpredictability of the students and their outrageous talents adds the rest.

Clearly I need to read more Khaw. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Cassandra Khaw click here