When your friend and sort-of-love-interest gets sucked into hell, what choice do you have but to go down and get him?
When we last left our plucky heroes, Alex had almost gotten killed by a ghost, then almost killed by the dean who had acted as her mentor. Darlington was not so lucky, as he got sucked into hell, but Alex doesn’t consider that a reason to give up on him.
As with Ninth House, this book likes to jump back and forth in time a bit, but I don’t think it does so as much as the first book. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I read this one instead of listening to it that made it easier for me to follow along.
The book starts with Alex getting pushed down the basement stairs of Darlington’s house, then locked in the basement. Before we can find out what happened, the book jumps back in time a few months to start at the beginning (more or less), which is to say the beginning of Alex’s sophomore year at Yale.
This book does a little more jumping around in time after that, and it took me a while to catch on. At the beginning of the school year, we see Alex terrorizing someone who owes money to some thug named Eitan. It’s not clear why she’s doing it until a few chapters later when the book takes us further back in time to when said thug tricks her into revealing her ability to use ghosts for extra strength.
Turns out said thug was the one who got Alex and her friend hooked on drugs all those years ago. He’s been looking for whoever killed a bunch of his guys the night Hellie died, and he finally found a surveillance video that showed Alex walking away from the scene carrying a bloody baseball bat.
And he knows where Alex’s mom lives, so if she doesn’t help him collect from especially difficult borrowers, he’ll have her mom killed.
It seems straightforward enough until he sends Alex to collect from a vampire. Alex barely escapes with her life, and is left traumatized and trying to figure out how to get her and her mom out of this situation.
In the meantime, she and Dawes have been hanging out at Darlington’s house, keeping it in order as much as they can, while researching how to get to hell and back. It’s not something people advertise, for obvious reasons, and the records of the one or two successful trips that were made have been covered up or destroyed. Alex and Dawes stumble upon the answer almost by accident, but they’re going to need help.
The trip requires four people who have all committed murder, plus a lookout. By the time they make their trip, Alex has ended up telling her roommate, Mercy, all about the nine houses and her role there. She decided she wanted real friends, and she couldn’t have that if she kept lying to them, so she came clean.
Not only did Mercy take it surprisingly well, but she even gets involved and agrees to be their lookout for their trip to hell.
The good news is they find Darlington. The bad news is the ritual gets interrupted before they can pull Darlington out … or does it?
The other bad news is the guy who interrupted the ritual is Anselm, who is understandably pissed that they would attempt something so dangerous. He immediately dismisses Turner from his position and bars Alex and Dawes from Lethe. He doesn’t say as much, but Alex is pretty sure this also means the end of her time at Yale. If she doesn’t have the scholarship Lethe gave her, there’s no way she can afford to keep going to Yale.
When they get back to Darlington’s house, they find a version of Darlington completely naked with giant horns and a certain organ standing up very straight, although he doesn’t give any other indication of being turned on. On the contrary, he appears very calm, despite being trapped in a very small area in the middle of the ballroom floor.
Throughout the book, Alex isn’t entirely sure it’s really Darlington. Is it a demon who has partially taken on Darlington’s form? Or is it Darlington and a demon smooshed together into one body?
Whatever the answer, the fact remains she has to get him out of hell, so they find another date that works and convince the merry travelers to go back with them.
That’s made more complicated when they realize they weren’t the only ones who made it back from hell. A demon followed each of them and has since taken on the form of the people they killed to try and feed off their guilt and shame. Fortunately, Dawes was able to cast a spell using talismans to protect each of them, but Alex worries what might happen if the demons are left to wander freely. Will they turn into vampires like Linus Reiter?
Linus Reiter, it turns out, is the vampire Eitan sent Alex to “collect from.” Upon doing some research, Alex finds out he was a student at Yale in the early 1930s, and was also probably one of the students to first “walk the gauntlet” (i.e. travel to hell and back.) The question becomes, did he turn into a vampire at some point? Or did a demon follow him from hell, kill him, and take on his likeness and his life?
While conducting all this research and trying to put the pieces together, more people keep dying. A professor turns up dead in her office, seemingly having aged decades overnight. Turner (a local cop who knows about Lethe) calls Alex in for help since everything about the death screams “paranormal.”
Despite the fact that Anselm banned them from Lethe, Il Bastone still grants them access when they go there to hide from the demons until the demons set fire to the house to literally smoke them out.
Walsh-Whiteley, the misogynist who replaced Dean Sandow as their mentor, shows up as a result of the fire and asks to meet with Alex the next day. He doesn’t say anything about her having been banned from Lethe, which seems weird, but maybe Anselm just hadn’t gotten around to telling him yet?
In the meantime, Turner pulls Alex aside to tell her someone’s been arrested for confessing to the murders, but that something about it doesn’t feel right.
Alex goes to interview the alleged murderer, and although he insists he did it, he also insists the “ram” led him to the murders. That makes Alex think of Darlington and his horns, so she heads back to his house to confront him, and that’s when she gets shoved down the stairs.
Locked in the basement Alex finds the two drained husks of Darlington’s parents, along with their ghosts who say they were killed by “something like” their son.
Anselm shows up and Alex puts the pieces together about how he’s been acting so strange lately. She uses her salt talisman to reveal he’s been a demon all along. Not just any demon, but the demon Darlington has been chained to.
Alex uses the circle where Darlington had previously been trapped to make her way back to hell and find Darlington. The one thing she had been using to help anchor Darlington to his life has been destroyed, but she realizes she doesn’t need it if he’s nothing but a ghost now. Ghosts she can suck into her body, so she sucks Darlington into her body to bring him back to the world of the living and deposit him back into his own body. As soon as he does, he makes straight for the demon and tears him in half, although it’s still not enough to truly kill him.
There’s still the matter of the demons to deal with, which means the four travelers have to make their way back to hell.
Unfortunately, their fourth member, Tripp, isn’t answering his phone and no one has seen him for a few days. Fortunately, Darlington can take his place, so they all head back to hell to confront Golgaroth, the demon Darlington had been chained to all summer and fall.
Golgaroth claims that, since they took Darlington’s soul, they need to leave another soul to maintain the balance. He wants Alex’s soul because, as a Wheelwalker, he can use her soul to prop open the doors of hell, letting his demons come and go as they please.
That’s obviously not OK with Alex and her friends. Fortunately, Alex had planned for this by telling Eitan she would be working for Lucas Reiter and that she and her mother were now under his protection, so Eitan better not try any funny business. She deliberately pissed him off so he would follow her to the library while she and her friends were “walking the gauntlet.”
Sure enough, Eitan confronts Mercy during the ritual. Mercy shoves him into the fountain, whereupon he falls into hell, where Alex is able to grab his soul and pass it to Golgaroth at the moment he tries taking Alex’s soul, thereby binding Eitan to Golgaroth instead of her.
I’d say they all live happily ever after, but we know that’s not true, right?
Mercy is now a murderer and she’s not OK with that, so she starts to pull away from Alex and her friends.
On the other hand, since Alex rescued Darlington from hell, he says he is now bound to her and has to serve her for life, and she’s not entirely sure how she feels about that…
I was kind of surprised to read my review of Ninth House and see that I said I couldn’t wait for the sequel, because I was hesitant to pick this up. I had such a hard time following what was happening in Ninth House, that I wasn’t sure I would enjoy Hell Bent.
I did need to read a synopsis of Ninth House before diving into this book, but I think reading it might have been the better choice to read a physical copy rather than listen to the audiobook because I never felt lost in this book. I was completely wrapped up in the mysteries and the trips to hell and all the exciting adventures Alex was having, and I am very much looking forward to more books in this series.