Epeolatry Book Review: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
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Title: The Library at Hellebore
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Publication date: 22nd July, 2025
Synopsis: The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled. But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together. If not, this school will eat them alive.
Cassandra Khaw has racked up a string of awards and nominations in the course of their meteoric career, including a Bram Stoker Award and nominations for British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards, Locus Award and Shirley Jackson Award. Khaw has also worked extensively in video games and TTRPGs, which perhaps helps explain why there’s such a strong sense of progression and pacing in the book, and why this is such a page-turner – despite, or even because of, its horrors.
Briefly, the rationale (not that the narrative is especially hostage to systematic rationality) is that magic has re-emerged in somewhere like our modern world, and has been more or less domesticated through relentless bureaucracy. One pinnacle of the thaumatocratic edifice is academies for the magically gifted, of which Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted – “the premier academy for the dangerously powerful” – is a shining capstone. Some of its inmates compete eagerly to be admitted; others, like the protagonist, don’t exactly have a choice. Unfortunately for everyone, Hellebore turns out to be very much a poisoned chalice, and graduation degenerates into a Battle Royale scenario, with all of the contestants armed with magical WMDs and the faculty as a vulturine Greek chorus.
The pre-order ads for the book speak of an “exclusive hardcover edition – a gorgeous hardcover edition featuring cobalt blue sprayed edges”. I can’t speak to that, as I reviewed digital ARCs. I can speak of the book’s internal decor, which includes ceiling frescoes of “dead men swaying from nooses of their own intestines”, carnivorous deer “stalking frightened men through black woods, their muzzles steaming, a red glare in their eyes, which were only pupil”, and giant homunculi crafted from slabs of raw skinless muscle. Those are just a few of the delights on display. Seldom has academic life ever been so literally cut-throat – and cut-tongue, cut-viscera, etc.
I’m not sure if the author intended a vicious parody of the kind of cosy-whimsy establishments popularized by J.K.Rowling, Tim Burton, Terry Pratchett, et al., but it certainly succeeds on that level, as on many others. Khaw’s sardonic, poised prose, only occasionally stretching the verbs slightly too far, barely ever loses a tinge of irony, amid all the horrors. Not that all the intimations of irreality are body horror; there’s plenty of subtler symptoms of disquiet. The protagonist, Alessa, is likeable similarly as cats are liked for their sharp-clawed standoffishness, but it’s not as if she hasn’t got good reason. Hellebore itself kills students casually even before the final bloodbath, and most of the students are guilty of multiple homicides, or acts-of-extreme-self-defence, or accidental-mass-deaths, even before they arrive at the place. But being a monster in the first place doesn’t necessarily excuse monstrous treatment.
It’s very clear what this story is. It’s also hard to imagine how it could be written with any more style and panache. You may be shocked, hooked, and disgusted – at yourself for enjoying it so much. You certainly won’t be bored.
/5
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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish author, poet, journalist, historian, games writer, and media professional. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently lives in France.
Paul’s first collection of short stories, Black Propaganda, appeared from H. Harksen Productions in 2016. His second story collection, The Echo of The Sea & other Strange War Stories, was published by Egaeus Press in 2017. His short novel The Three Books was published by Black Shuck Books in 2018. His short story “The People of the Island,” in Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales, from H. Harksen Productions, received an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year Volume Two list for 2009 and his story “The First Circus of the New Year” received the same in 2016. His historical novel Begin the Beguine and his semi-autobiographical novel Death of a Doppelgänger were both published in 2023. He has written several books of French wartime history. His latest horror work is his apocalyptic novel Theogasm (2024).
Paul’s acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Publishing in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013. His second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published by H. Harksen Productions in 2011. His sonnet cycle The Great Arcana: Sonnets for the 22 Trumps of the Tarot, and his ballad cycle Black Ballads, based on traditional Scottish myths and legends, were both published in 2022.
Paul’s Lovecraftian and dark fiction, and criticism, has appeared in numerous formats and journals worldwide, including Occult Detective Magazine, Weirdbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, the Financial Times, the UK Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, Arts of Asia, Strange Horizons, A Broad Scot, and elsewhere. His co-translations from the Japanese, done with Maki Sugiyama, include The Poems of Nakahara Chuya (1993) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995) by the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, which won a Japan Festival Award. He also co-translated Superstrings (2007) by Dinu Flamand from Romanian with Olga Dunca. Paul is a former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors of Great Britain. He was rated #1 of “The 12 Publishing Shakers You Should Be Following” by The Independent Publishing Magazine. He is also the official clan poet of Clan Mackintosh.
