THE VERDICT: At first, it seemed disappointingly close to being excellent. Then it turned disappointing just how far from excellence it really was.
THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT: Leigh Bardugo is clearly a skillful writer. She knows how to construct a compelling sentence. She knows how to sequence a twisty plot, how to construct a mystery, how to flesh out a world, and how to make a character compelling.
But the more I read of Ninth House, the more it smacked of... marketing copy, for lack of a better term. I remember an old essay by a literary critic who described J. K. Rowling's prose in Harry Potter as "50% literary and 50% salesmanship;" Bardugo's style is frustrating because it feels more genuinely literary, but slowly reveals itself to be nothing but manipulative tactics. It feels like a carnival, or like a roller coaster: each individual piece is intended to beguile and thrill, but Bardugo is so concerned with rushing you along to the next moment, the next little hook, that very little of it has time to genuinely come alive.
It's a shame, because her world and her characters and her mysteries are compelling enough that I wanted them to come to life. Halfway through the book, I was doing my best to ignore the sleight-of-hand, the feeling of unsavory slickness, and focus on the plot at hand. Three-quarters of my way in, I told a friend that Ninth House really needed to stick its landing: it wasn't holding up well enough to justify a shoddy finale. And frustratingly, it came close—close enough that I believed it would get away with everything—before derailing itself horribly and spectacularly in its final moments.
It's amazing how, in the span of its final two chapters, I went from "I'm frustrated with this but will absolutely read the sequel" to "I'm having second thoughts about reading the sequel" to "I'll be donating this book as quickly as possible, so I don't have to sit with it on my shelf." It would have been so easy for Ninth House to be better than it was; after reading it, I'm fully convinced that Bardugo is talented enough to have come up with something better. Even a mediocre ending would have saved it. But its flub was so bad—and not only bad, but literarily gross—that I can't possibly trust this series with another minute of my life.
Without spoiling anything, let's dig into why that is.
THE STYLE: Like I said, Leigh Bardugo knows how to write. One of the things that grabbed me from the first page was how ably she throws in rich little details that hint at a grander world to come. Ninth House has that marvelous feeling of a world unfolding, as if the whole thing is alive and just waiting for you to discover it. Her characterization and her dialogue is finely-wrought: she finds ways to invest you in her characters and their relationships without being overly heavy-handed about it.
But there's a certain ever-present breathlessness to her pacing that, bit by bit, began to rub me the wrong way. Ninth House never slows down: it's constantly jumping to the next action beat, the next sequence, the next event in an endless series of events. That's an effective way to keep a plot moving, but it comes at the cost of letting anything breathe. Moments don't have time to land; characters don't have time to develop. The effect over time is interesting: my first impression of any given character was far more rewarding than subsequent impressions, because their early encounters hint at depths worth delving into, but depths were just never delved. Everything felt like a set piece: a prop that was designed to make me want to invest in it, in a way that felt skillful at first and calculated later on. It slowly became clear that I was never going to get what I was hoping for: that Bardugo wasn't cleverly establishing her world so much as she was manipulating me into wanting to invest.
It's telling, I think, that both of Ninth House's two major characters have the majority of their characterization handled via flashback. And it's telling that every one of those flashbacks has a distinct feeling of: This is the part where I'll tell you who this person is and why you should care. There's a workmanship, of sorts, to how reliably those flashbacks are inserted, and how mechanically each one lays down new "revelations" that are meant to establish character. But because this is the only way characterization is handled, it feels more like a checking-off of boxes than like a genuine act of storytelling.
THE WORLD: To put it bluntly, Ninth House is Yale porn. Its universe is made up of Yale's actual secret societies, overlaid with new details of Bardugo's magical world. In classic noir-esque fashion, this is counterpointed with plenty of descriptions of how awful and venal and grotesque its students and faculty members are, and Ninth House clearly wants to tell a (trendy!) story of class exploitation and patriarchy, but there's no disguising how much it relishes its descriptions of Yale student life. This point is driven home by the way that, every few chapters, Ninth House offers up an aside describing one of Yale's eight major houses, accompanied by a pithy description of what that house's parties are like. The allure of the world is, by and large, the allure of getting to watch rich kids throw exotic parties.
I'm not opposed to that in theory, but again, it feels like set dressing. In fact, it's frustrating how good Bardugo is at making you want to dive into the underbelly of this world, and how effectively she teases the houses you haven't seen and the flavors of magic they practice. In the end, her tour of the houses feels literally like tourism: you stay at each location for just long enough to take a neat-looking snapshot and move along. Each house is typically associated with one or two side characters, most of whom wind up being suspects in the central murder mystery; unfortunately, I don't think we see a single one of them more than twice across the book's 450 pages. Again, it's not that I didn't want to get more of this world: it's that, for a book this relatively hefty, I'm shocked at how little of the world we ultimately get.
The overall portrayal of Yale and New Haven, however, is quite compelling. Bardugo, a Yale graduate, does a great job of giving New Haven a personality in and of itself; she characterizes Yale itself as a delightful blend of magical and cancerous. There's something wondrous to the sense that magic is real here, paired with the horror that it is largely possessed by the worst people imaginable. I really cannot stress how much I wanted to like this book: its bones are largely excellent. Which made it frustrating how little meat there was to it, and how unforgivably the book handles a few of its key elements.
THE MAGIC: Once more, Ninth House makes itself intriguing and engrossing right at the start, then goes onto repeatedly undermine itself. By and large, magic is portrayed as wild, dangerous, and wrong: there's a sense that it truly ought to be forbidden, and that no good can come of it. At the same time, it's too fascinating not to want more of: Bardugo's readers, like her characters, want to delve into it, even knowing that its consequences might be traumatic.
Here, however, is where Bardugo's worst tendency as a writer starts to reveal itself: namely, she repeatedly advances her plot by means of abruptly introducing a new facet of magic into her world, dramatically and without warning. She then backpedals to offer a little bit of context before moving past it altogether. The effect is that, throughout the novel, Bardugo randomly tosses out a new word or phrase or concept, centers a major plot beat around it, then leaves it behind.
If Ninth House established its magic more thoughtfully, it could have been a terrific thriller whose logic revolved around the way we're slowly learning its spellcraft works. If Bardugo had thrown these details in more playfully, without attempting to wrench her entire plot around concepts that didn't exist five seconds ago, her frequent abrupt dramatic shifts might have felt more earned. And if she'd taken the time to stick to the concepts she threw out, letting them color her world forevermore, then I could write this off as a slightly jarring approach to creating a fantastic universe.
Instead, the combined effect just feels... lazy. At one moment, an action scene breaks out without warning, and then, before it has time to develop, centers itself around a Major Revelation—as in, half a page into the sequence, the narrative announces that we're about to discover Something Big, and then the chapter ends. What follows are two separate chapters of flashbacks, one for each of the novel's two POV characters. The first of those chapters tries to end on the same Major Revelation as the action sequence before it did, though the revelation doesn't make much logical sense and doesn't feel particularly earned. The second chapter then comprehensively fleshes out the Revelation that the first chapter already touched upon, details the logic of a never-before-hinted-at power, and only then leaps us back to the action sequence, long-since-forgotten, which resolves as abruptly as it began with Our Heroine using the power that's now been laboriously explained to us.
Done in isolation, this might make for a neat one-time literary technique and dramatic reveal. (Though as I said earlier, the book's many flashbacks all feel so neatly like Character Delivery Vessels that their effect is underwhelming.) Where I permanently lost faith in the book was in its final climactic confrontation, which appears to be delivering one twist before pivoting without warning to a second twist that involves a character abruptly throwing a new term and concept at us, capitalized to let us know of itsbranding significance. This is an unforgivably lazy way to handle what ought to have been the book's biggest payoff: you shouldn't have to pause your climax in order to didactically explain a new piece of lore, in order to make said climax make sense.
(A page later, when a second new piece of lore is revealed to explain a third major twist, Ninth House goes beyond "frustratingly lazy" to just feel stupid. I've read anime fanfic that laid out its lore more cleverly than this.)
The book ends, post-climactic resolution, with one final introduction of New Lore that's intended to abruptly reveal a shocking twist about a character which in turn is meant to serve as the sequel's primary hook. When I described Ninth House as "manipulative," this is what I meant. It's not a bad thing to try and surprise your readers, or to withhold details from them in order to drop jaws at the right moment. And there's nothing wrong with trying to give a reader reasons to keep reading: the craft of storytelling largely revolves around keeping eyes glued to the page. But Bardugo's techniques are so blatantly obvious, and so appallingly lazy, that they verge on contempt. The fact that these techniques clearly work with so many of her readers makes me feel bad on behalf of her biggest fans. This is a shitty way to reward readers for their commitment to a story, and it's a shitty way to keep those readers committed, and Ninth House's many fans deserve better.
THE MYSTERY: I said earlier that this book is a noir at heart, and I stand by that. Historically speaking, noirs break down into two major categories: the ones where the mystery more-or-less doesn't matter, because it serves as an entryway into the world and its denizens; and the ones where the mystery wants to be taken seriously. Are you actively trying to solve the mystery? Or is the mystery just the MacGuffin that keeps you going further? (Put another way, not all noirs legitimately care about being mysteries too, even the ones that present themselves as mystery.)
By and large, Ninth House doesn't present itself as a noir that cares about its mystery. It's far more invested in the atmosphere of its world than in playing the games that mysteries play to keep you hooked. (A different approach from, say, Harry Potter, which is probably more effective as a series of mystery novels than as any of its many other also-effective genres.) It matters less who murdered Tara Hutchins, or who murdered all of protagonist Alex Stern's former housemates, or whether the ghost known as the Bridegroom murdered his wife, than the way that these questions drive Alex deeper into New Haven's most terrible secrets. The specific answers matter less than the feeling of living in a world where these grisly things happen. In Ninth House, as with any good noir, the specific culprits matter less than the dreadful dawning realization that the culprits will likely get away with their crimes, because the rich and powerful are almost never brought to justice.
I want to stress that this is a totally okay way for noirs to work. I love me a good mystery, but I'm also fine with stories whose mysteries more-or-less fade into the background, leaving the focus on character drama and worldbuilding. (Though Ninth House flounders when it comes to both those things, like I said.)
But Ninth House feels weirdly insecure about its choice not to focus too hard on making a compelling mystery. It continually tries to throw out potential culprits, or raise possible red herrings—none of which are particularly effective, because Bardugo spends almost no time establishing the characters we're meant to suspect. The fact that it raises so many different mysteries leaves it feeling strangely cluttered: I lost track of which mysteries Alex was trying to solve and why, because so few of them bothered making a case as to why I ought to be invested in their solving. And because the motives and methods behind literally every mystery revolve around a new magical mechanic that Bardugo only reveals as she's revealing one of her several killers, the payoffs feel underwhelming at best, and nonsensical at worst. You can't tell a mystery story while withholding such pivotal information that there's no possible way for the audience to follow along.
(It doesn't help that, while she's revealing the solution to the one halfway-compelling mystery she's got going, Bardugo immediately and abruptly pivots to the far-stupider resolution of a far-less-compelling mystery, dropping the best thing her plot had going for her. To make matters worse, the plotline she abruptly drops is the one that most thematically ties into her story and her world, whereas the plotline she drops it for is not only borderline incoherent, but seems to run counter to the themes that made her world interesting to begin with.)
There's a bit towards the end where Bardugo carefully pores back over all the "clues" that were meant to point towards her real answer. Not only do those clues revolve around exceedingly minor details that don't feel relevant to the book's narrative to begin with, they also don't reveal anything that we didn't already know. The things that we couldn't have known, meanwhile, are not only more significant to the plot that Ninth House has constructed, but aren't foreshadowed at all. That doesn't just feel cheap: it feels like a disservice to the world and its lore. Because one of the Major Reveals at the end does genuinely add a new dimension to the novel, and one that deepens its best and most interesting theme. Which makes it a shame that it's utterly concealed as a plot device, revealed in a lazy "gotcha!" moment at the end of the book, and immediately dropped for a worse and more incoherent concept.)
THE SEXUAL ASSAULTS. [Content warning follows for, uh, sexual assaults.]
Virtually every one of Ninth House's plot lines, big and small, revolve around some flavor of rape. To some extent, that's clearly intentional: Alex Stern is a survivor of some pretty grody sexual violence, and she's drawn to the murdered Tara Hutchins because she sees parallels between Tara's life and her own. The book revolves around the sociopathic hedonism of the rich, and the ways in which they view the lower classes as disposable. Time and again, Bardugo's preferred way of demonstrating this is through sexual violence, which reinforces the parallels she draws between abuses of the lower and middle classes and abuses of women as a whole.
There's nothing wrong with using sexual violence to create a world that feels paranoid, claustrophobic, and fundamentally hostile. And it's not even like Bardugo is inaccurate in depicting a world whose women are, by and large, sexually assaulted at some point or other. (Along with one man.) What I take issue with is how luridly Ninth House handles its many instances of sexual assault, and with the way it seems to insert rape every time it needs a new emotional plot beat.
There's a horrifying description of magic-laced sexual assault early on in the book, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it felt like Bardugo asking about the unexamined implications of a world in which magic is real: what are the ways in which these profound shifts in power and reality might result in horrifying and natural real-life consequences? On the other, it felt conspicuously like an instance of rape-as-plot-device: how do you establish that magic has real stakes? Through sexual assault, of course! (Ninth House has a rave blurb on its book jacket from Lev Grossman, whose Magicians trilogy similarly handles "deconstructing magic's glamour and mystique" by means of abruptly, and somewhat smugly, raping one of its central characters.)
As time went on, the book's use of sexual assault began to feel ploddingly, drearily, tediously predictable. While the book's narrative throughline is largely straightfoward, with few deviations, one of its few genuine side plots involves a relatively minor character being sexually assaulted at a party; this is thrown into the mix, among other reasons, to give Alex a reason to feel guilty, to reveal a new magic-related development in its mystery, and to set up a bit of poetic justice that feels a bit too neat and prim to really land. Later, the rapist is used as a red herring in one of the book's final attempts at misdirection, which fails to land because there is no convincing attempt to associate him with the murder whatsoever. He is introduced as a rapist, he exists for a satisfying bit of comeuppance, and then he returns out of nowhere to misdirect and to perform a little more dramatic assault; that is the whole of his existence as a character. The emotional consequences to his victim, meanwhile, are given brief attention before getting dropped altogether; she barely exists before her assault and barely exists after it, which leads to the conclusion that she primarily exists to get raped and drive the plot. This is hardly the only time that this happens.
Later, in one of Bardugo's many revelatory flashbacks, a mystery is solved alongside yet another description of horrific sexual assault. It feels almost obligatory: there was a question that needed answering, a bit of shadow in the narrative that needed to be illuminated, so what do we insert there? More rape! There's something darkly, unintentionally funny to how Ninth House treats rape as a punchline and a plot point. It's still harrowing and bleak, but it feels forced—not because it's inaccurate, but because it's too lazy to bother saying anything new. Women who we already know have been sexually assaulted get sexually assaulted even more. Women who were murdered turn out to have been sexually assaulted. Women are inserted into the narrative to get sexually assaulted some more, and then they get written out of the narrative, because their purpose has been served.
It's interesting, in this light, that one of Ninth House's only (semi-)fleshed-out male characters gets sexually assaulted too, albeit less violently. It feels like Ninth House is drawing parallels between college life and sexual debauchery, and between sexual debauchery and abuse of power. The rich and famous among Yale's students get what they want, and what they want is sexual; therefore, they reveal in using magic to sexually violate anybody less important or powerful than them. Again, there is a theme there, but it never gets developed: it's a note that gets sounded again and again and again, saying nothing new, doing nothing different, reminding us that we should be horrified on its victims' behalves while simultaneously spending virtually no time with any of its victims. It's dark and edgy! It's horrible! It's relevant! Rape!!!!!!!
FINAL THOUGHTS: It depresses me that Ninth House is in the upper echelon of popular fantasies published these days. It depresses me in the same way that pulpier, more explicitly pornographic fantasy novels depress me: not for their subject matter, and not because people like and enjoy them, but because it feels gross how little these authors seem to care about their work, or about their fans, or about anything but maximizing the amount of money and fame they can wheedle out of their chosen demographic.
What's frustrating about Ninth House is that, for so much of its duration, it feels like it's trying to be better than those crasser, more blatant marketing schemes. It feels like it wants to tell a story, rather than just hitting the kinds of plot beats that light up the right dopamine receptors in its readers' heads. Bardugo is a genuinely good writer! She clearly understands her craft, and that winds up being a damning indictment of her: there's no way she doesn't understand how lazy and incompetent her worst moments are, just like there's no coincidence that they're shoved all the way towards the back of her book, right before she makes her lazy marketing pitch for the sequel. There was a better book waiting to be written here, and the fact that it wasn't written speaks volumes for what Bardugo thinks of her craft, and of her audience. It says what she really cares about—and it says how little she cares about anything else.
I can't remember a book ever losing my trust quite as quickly, or quite as unexpectedly, as Ninth House did in its last several chapters. Early on, I was determined to overlook the gross feeling of its marketing sheen—an author's got to sell herself, right? Closing in on the end, I was frustrated that that oily sheen never went away, and that the plot strings Bardugo was tugging at were so barely concealed, so rote, so void of substance... and I was still convinced—convinced!—that I would be happily buying its sequel and following along. It was only at the very end that I found myself incapable of good faith. The trust Ninth House had built with me—and it had built ample trust—was squandered brutally and senselessly. I felt like a sucker, for letting myself believe the book I was reading could have been better.
No: I felt like a sucker for wanting the book to be better. It felt like, in Ninth House's final moments, I was being scornfully mocked for hoping for the best. How dare I expect something even slightly less slovenly done? Bardugo had provided me with the trappings of a quality novel: the stylish writing, the inventive world, the intriguing cast of characters. In doing that, she suggested that this was all that made for good writing: glib sentences, a world worth building a wiki around, character hooks for my pending fanfiction. The reveals were Big, weren't they? The themes were Gritty? I'd been given all kinds of excuses to post TikToks gushing about Ninth House, all kinds of things to bring up in casual conversation with my friends where I'd enthuse all about its many, many qualities, as if "qualities" were just bullet points in a future marketing pitch, as if the point of a "quality" was to be piled up alongside other qualities in an ironically quantitative way.
There's nothing new to a literary era being defined by bullshit marketing exercises: that's been true of every era since mass publishing was first invented. And there's similarly nothing new to authors who know how to craft the bullshit pretense of "quality," tailored to whatever their era's definition of "good" happens to look like. There are plenty of books that look and feel like highbrow literature, despite being utterly vacuous. There are many of authors who've been lauded for their ability to land tremendous audiences, and hailed as voices of their generation, only to be completely forgotten a decade later. Leigh Bardugo isn't pretending even to that much. All she promised was a dark, sexy, gritty fantasy that wasn't, for once, vacuous junk.
I'm disappointed that I let myself believe her. And I'm disappointed that I let myself get suckered in by something that, on some level, I suspected was out to sucker me. But what frustrates me is that, when I have an experience like this, it makes me that much less willing to trust new authors, or new works. It frustrates me that reading Ninth House means I might be too suspicious or jaded or cynical to give a better book a try. And it frustrates me that, in a world where books like Ninth House are as popular and as lauded as they are, people have less of a reason to expect better, or to look for better, or to want better. It sucks that this is what we think is good—not because it isn't very nearly good, not even because it could have been good and wasn't, but because it's bad in a way that suggests its author very clearly feels that "good" isn't worth pursuing to begin with. It's a book that never could have been as bad as it wound up being if "good" had mattered in the slightest. And the fact that it works so hard to provide the trappings of "good," without bothering to even halfass the actual work of being good, feels vastly grosser than if Ninth House had let itself be bad to begin with. Misspelled fantasy dragon smut has more self-respect.
THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT: Leigh Bardugo is clearly a skillful writer. She knows how to construct a compelling sentence. She knows how to sequence a twisty plot, how to construct a mystery, how to flesh out a world, and how to make a character compelling.
But the more I read of Ninth House, the more it smacked of... marketing copy, for lack of a better term. I remember an old essay by a literary critic who described J. K. Rowling's prose in Harry Potter as "50% literary and 50% salesmanship;" Bardugo's style is frustrating because it feels more genuinely literary, but slowly reveals itself to be nothing but manipulative tactics. It feels like a carnival, or like a roller coaster: each individual piece is intended to beguile and thrill, but Bardugo is so concerned with rushing you along to the next moment, the next little hook, that very little of it has time to genuinely come alive.
It's a shame, because her world and her characters and her mysteries are compelling enough that I wanted them to come to life. Halfway through the book, I was doing my best to ignore the sleight-of-hand, the feeling of unsavory slickness, and focus on the plot at hand. Three-quarters of my way in, I told a friend that Ninth House really needed to stick its landing: it wasn't holding up well enough to justify a shoddy finale. And frustratingly, it came close—close enough that I believed it would get away with everything—before derailing itself horribly and spectacularly in its final moments.
It's amazing how, in the span of its final two chapters, I went from "I'm frustrated with this but will absolutely read the sequel" to "I'm having second thoughts about reading the sequel" to "I'll be donating this book as quickly as possible, so I don't have to sit with it on my shelf." It would have been so easy for Ninth House to be better than it was; after reading it, I'm fully convinced that Bardugo is talented enough to have come up with something better. Even a mediocre ending would have saved it. But its flub was so bad—and not only bad, but literarily gross—that I can't possibly trust this series with another minute of my life.
Without spoiling anything, let's dig into why that is.
THE STYLE: Like I said, Leigh Bardugo knows how to write. One of the things that grabbed me from the first page was how ably she throws in rich little details that hint at a grander world to come. Ninth House has that marvelous feeling of a world unfolding, as if the whole thing is alive and just waiting for you to discover it. Her characterization and her dialogue is finely-wrought: she finds ways to invest you in her characters and their relationships without being overly heavy-handed about it.
But there's a certain ever-present breathlessness to her pacing that, bit by bit, began to rub me the wrong way. Ninth House never slows down: it's constantly jumping to the next action beat, the next sequence, the next event in an endless series of events. That's an effective way to keep a plot moving, but it comes at the cost of letting anything breathe. Moments don't have time to land; characters don't have time to develop. The effect over time is interesting: my first impression of any given character was far more rewarding than subsequent impressions, because their early encounters hint at depths worth delving into, but depths were just never delved. Everything felt like a set piece: a prop that was designed to make me want to invest in it, in a way that felt skillful at first and calculated later on. It slowly became clear that I was never going to get what I was hoping for: that Bardugo wasn't cleverly establishing her world so much as she was manipulating me into wanting to invest.
It's telling, I think, that both of Ninth House's two major characters have the majority of their characterization handled via flashback. And it's telling that every one of those flashbacks has a distinct feeling of: This is the part where I'll tell you who this person is and why you should care. There's a workmanship, of sorts, to how reliably those flashbacks are inserted, and how mechanically each one lays down new "revelations" that are meant to establish character. But because this is the only way characterization is handled, it feels more like a checking-off of boxes than like a genuine act of storytelling.
THE WORLD: To put it bluntly, Ninth House is Yale porn. Its universe is made up of Yale's actual secret societies, overlaid with new details of Bardugo's magical world. In classic noir-esque fashion, this is counterpointed with plenty of descriptions of how awful and venal and grotesque its students and faculty members are, and Ninth House clearly wants to tell a (trendy!) story of class exploitation and patriarchy, but there's no disguising how much it relishes its descriptions of Yale student life. This point is driven home by the way that, every few chapters, Ninth House offers up an aside describing one of Yale's eight major houses, accompanied by a pithy description of what that house's parties are like. The allure of the world is, by and large, the allure of getting to watch rich kids throw exotic parties.
I'm not opposed to that in theory, but again, it feels like set dressing. In fact, it's frustrating how good Bardugo is at making you want to dive into the underbelly of this world, and how effectively she teases the houses you haven't seen and the flavors of magic they practice. In the end, her tour of the houses feels literally like tourism: you stay at each location for just long enough to take a neat-looking snapshot and move along. Each house is typically associated with one or two side characters, most of whom wind up being suspects in the central murder mystery; unfortunately, I don't think we see a single one of them more than twice across the book's 450 pages. Again, it's not that I didn't want to get more of this world: it's that, for a book this relatively hefty, I'm shocked at how little of the world we ultimately get.
The overall portrayal of Yale and New Haven, however, is quite compelling. Bardugo, a Yale graduate, does a great job of giving New Haven a personality in and of itself; she characterizes Yale itself as a delightful blend of magical and cancerous. There's something wondrous to the sense that magic is real here, paired with the horror that it is largely possessed by the worst people imaginable. I really cannot stress how much I wanted to like this book: its bones are largely excellent. Which made it frustrating how little meat there was to it, and how unforgivably the book handles a few of its key elements.
THE MAGIC: Once more, Ninth House makes itself intriguing and engrossing right at the start, then goes onto repeatedly undermine itself. By and large, magic is portrayed as wild, dangerous, and wrong: there's a sense that it truly ought to be forbidden, and that no good can come of it. At the same time, it's too fascinating not to want more of: Bardugo's readers, like her characters, want to delve into it, even knowing that its consequences might be traumatic.
Here, however, is where Bardugo's worst tendency as a writer starts to reveal itself: namely, she repeatedly advances her plot by means of abruptly introducing a new facet of magic into her world, dramatically and without warning. She then backpedals to offer a little bit of context before moving past it altogether. The effect is that, throughout the novel, Bardugo randomly tosses out a new word or phrase or concept, centers a major plot beat around it, then leaves it behind.
If Ninth House established its magic more thoughtfully, it could have been a terrific thriller whose logic revolved around the way we're slowly learning its spellcraft works. If Bardugo had thrown these details in more playfully, without attempting to wrench her entire plot around concepts that didn't exist five seconds ago, her frequent abrupt dramatic shifts might have felt more earned. And if she'd taken the time to stick to the concepts she threw out, letting them color her world forevermore, then I could write this off as a slightly jarring approach to creating a fantastic universe.
Instead, the combined effect just feels... lazy. At one moment, an action scene breaks out without warning, and then, before it has time to develop, centers itself around a Major Revelation—as in, half a page into the sequence, the narrative announces that we're about to discover Something Big, and then the chapter ends. What follows are two separate chapters of flashbacks, one for each of the novel's two POV characters. The first of those chapters tries to end on the same Major Revelation as the action sequence before it did, though the revelation doesn't make much logical sense and doesn't feel particularly earned. The second chapter then comprehensively fleshes out the Revelation that the first chapter already touched upon, details the logic of a never-before-hinted-at power, and only then leaps us back to the action sequence, long-since-forgotten, which resolves as abruptly as it began with Our Heroine using the power that's now been laboriously explained to us.
Done in isolation, this might make for a neat one-time literary technique and dramatic reveal. (Though as I said earlier, the book's many flashbacks all feel so neatly like Character Delivery Vessels that their effect is underwhelming.) Where I permanently lost faith in the book was in its final climactic confrontation, which appears to be delivering one twist before pivoting without warning to a second twist that involves a character abruptly throwing a new term and concept at us, capitalized to let us know of its
(A page later, when a second new piece of lore is revealed to explain a third major twist, Ninth House goes beyond "frustratingly lazy" to just feel stupid. I've read anime fanfic that laid out its lore more cleverly than this.)
The book ends, post-climactic resolution, with one final introduction of New Lore that's intended to abruptly reveal a shocking twist about a character which in turn is meant to serve as the sequel's primary hook. When I described Ninth House as "manipulative," this is what I meant. It's not a bad thing to try and surprise your readers, or to withhold details from them in order to drop jaws at the right moment. And there's nothing wrong with trying to give a reader reasons to keep reading: the craft of storytelling largely revolves around keeping eyes glued to the page. But Bardugo's techniques are so blatantly obvious, and so appallingly lazy, that they verge on contempt. The fact that these techniques clearly work with so many of her readers makes me feel bad on behalf of her biggest fans. This is a shitty way to reward readers for their commitment to a story, and it's a shitty way to keep those readers committed, and Ninth House's many fans deserve better.
THE MYSTERY: I said earlier that this book is a noir at heart, and I stand by that. Historically speaking, noirs break down into two major categories: the ones where the mystery more-or-less doesn't matter, because it serves as an entryway into the world and its denizens; and the ones where the mystery wants to be taken seriously. Are you actively trying to solve the mystery? Or is the mystery just the MacGuffin that keeps you going further? (Put another way, not all noirs legitimately care about being mysteries too, even the ones that present themselves as mystery.)
By and large, Ninth House doesn't present itself as a noir that cares about its mystery. It's far more invested in the atmosphere of its world than in playing the games that mysteries play to keep you hooked. (A different approach from, say, Harry Potter, which is probably more effective as a series of mystery novels than as any of its many other also-effective genres.) It matters less who murdered Tara Hutchins, or who murdered all of protagonist Alex Stern's former housemates, or whether the ghost known as the Bridegroom murdered his wife, than the way that these questions drive Alex deeper into New Haven's most terrible secrets. The specific answers matter less than the feeling of living in a world where these grisly things happen. In Ninth House, as with any good noir, the specific culprits matter less than the dreadful dawning realization that the culprits will likely get away with their crimes, because the rich and powerful are almost never brought to justice.
I want to stress that this is a totally okay way for noirs to work. I love me a good mystery, but I'm also fine with stories whose mysteries more-or-less fade into the background, leaving the focus on character drama and worldbuilding. (Though Ninth House flounders when it comes to both those things, like I said.)
But Ninth House feels weirdly insecure about its choice not to focus too hard on making a compelling mystery. It continually tries to throw out potential culprits, or raise possible red herrings—none of which are particularly effective, because Bardugo spends almost no time establishing the characters we're meant to suspect. The fact that it raises so many different mysteries leaves it feeling strangely cluttered: I lost track of which mysteries Alex was trying to solve and why, because so few of them bothered making a case as to why I ought to be invested in their solving. And because the motives and methods behind literally every mystery revolve around a new magical mechanic that Bardugo only reveals as she's revealing one of her several killers, the payoffs feel underwhelming at best, and nonsensical at worst. You can't tell a mystery story while withholding such pivotal information that there's no possible way for the audience to follow along.
(It doesn't help that, while she's revealing the solution to the one halfway-compelling mystery she's got going, Bardugo immediately and abruptly pivots to the far-stupider resolution of a far-less-compelling mystery, dropping the best thing her plot had going for her. To make matters worse, the plotline she abruptly drops is the one that most thematically ties into her story and her world, whereas the plotline she drops it for is not only borderline incoherent, but seems to run counter to the themes that made her world interesting to begin with.)
There's a bit towards the end where Bardugo carefully pores back over all the "clues" that were meant to point towards her real answer. Not only do those clues revolve around exceedingly minor details that don't feel relevant to the book's narrative to begin with, they also don't reveal anything that we didn't already know. The things that we couldn't have known, meanwhile, are not only more significant to the plot that Ninth House has constructed, but aren't foreshadowed at all. That doesn't just feel cheap: it feels like a disservice to the world and its lore. Because one of the Major Reveals at the end does genuinely add a new dimension to the novel, and one that deepens its best and most interesting theme. Which makes it a shame that it's utterly concealed as a plot device, revealed in a lazy "gotcha!" moment at the end of the book, and immediately dropped for a worse and more incoherent concept.)
THE SEXUAL ASSAULTS. [Content warning follows for, uh, sexual assaults.]
Virtually every one of Ninth House's plot lines, big and small, revolve around some flavor of rape. To some extent, that's clearly intentional: Alex Stern is a survivor of some pretty grody sexual violence, and she's drawn to the murdered Tara Hutchins because she sees parallels between Tara's life and her own. The book revolves around the sociopathic hedonism of the rich, and the ways in which they view the lower classes as disposable. Time and again, Bardugo's preferred way of demonstrating this is through sexual violence, which reinforces the parallels she draws between abuses of the lower and middle classes and abuses of women as a whole.
There's nothing wrong with using sexual violence to create a world that feels paranoid, claustrophobic, and fundamentally hostile. And it's not even like Bardugo is inaccurate in depicting a world whose women are, by and large, sexually assaulted at some point or other. (Along with one man.) What I take issue with is how luridly Ninth House handles its many instances of sexual assault, and with the way it seems to insert rape every time it needs a new emotional plot beat.
There's a horrifying description of magic-laced sexual assault early on in the book, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it felt like Bardugo asking about the unexamined implications of a world in which magic is real: what are the ways in which these profound shifts in power and reality might result in horrifying and natural real-life consequences? On the other, it felt conspicuously like an instance of rape-as-plot-device: how do you establish that magic has real stakes? Through sexual assault, of course! (Ninth House has a rave blurb on its book jacket from Lev Grossman, whose Magicians trilogy similarly handles "deconstructing magic's glamour and mystique" by means of abruptly, and somewhat smugly, raping one of its central characters.)
As time went on, the book's use of sexual assault began to feel ploddingly, drearily, tediously predictable. While the book's narrative throughline is largely straightfoward, with few deviations, one of its few genuine side plots involves a relatively minor character being sexually assaulted at a party; this is thrown into the mix, among other reasons, to give Alex a reason to feel guilty, to reveal a new magic-related development in its mystery, and to set up a bit of poetic justice that feels a bit too neat and prim to really land. Later, the rapist is used as a red herring in one of the book's final attempts at misdirection, which fails to land because there is no convincing attempt to associate him with the murder whatsoever. He is introduced as a rapist, he exists for a satisfying bit of comeuppance, and then he returns out of nowhere to misdirect and to perform a little more dramatic assault; that is the whole of his existence as a character. The emotional consequences to his victim, meanwhile, are given brief attention before getting dropped altogether; she barely exists before her assault and barely exists after it, which leads to the conclusion that she primarily exists to get raped and drive the plot. This is hardly the only time that this happens.
Later, in one of Bardugo's many revelatory flashbacks, a mystery is solved alongside yet another description of horrific sexual assault. It feels almost obligatory: there was a question that needed answering, a bit of shadow in the narrative that needed to be illuminated, so what do we insert there? More rape! There's something darkly, unintentionally funny to how Ninth House treats rape as a punchline and a plot point. It's still harrowing and bleak, but it feels forced—not because it's inaccurate, but because it's too lazy to bother saying anything new. Women who we already know have been sexually assaulted get sexually assaulted even more. Women who were murdered turn out to have been sexually assaulted. Women are inserted into the narrative to get sexually assaulted some more, and then they get written out of the narrative, because their purpose has been served.
It's interesting, in this light, that one of Ninth House's only (semi-)fleshed-out male characters gets sexually assaulted too, albeit less violently. It feels like Ninth House is drawing parallels between college life and sexual debauchery, and between sexual debauchery and abuse of power. The rich and famous among Yale's students get what they want, and what they want is sexual; therefore, they reveal in using magic to sexually violate anybody less important or powerful than them. Again, there is a theme there, but it never gets developed: it's a note that gets sounded again and again and again, saying nothing new, doing nothing different, reminding us that we should be horrified on its victims' behalves while simultaneously spending virtually no time with any of its victims. It's dark and edgy! It's horrible! It's relevant! Rape!!!!!!!
FINAL THOUGHTS: It depresses me that Ninth House is in the upper echelon of popular fantasies published these days. It depresses me in the same way that pulpier, more explicitly pornographic fantasy novels depress me: not for their subject matter, and not because people like and enjoy them, but because it feels gross how little these authors seem to care about their work, or about their fans, or about anything but maximizing the amount of money and fame they can wheedle out of their chosen demographic.
What's frustrating about Ninth House is that, for so much of its duration, it feels like it's trying to be better than those crasser, more blatant marketing schemes. It feels like it wants to tell a story, rather than just hitting the kinds of plot beats that light up the right dopamine receptors in its readers' heads. Bardugo is a genuinely good writer! She clearly understands her craft, and that winds up being a damning indictment of her: there's no way she doesn't understand how lazy and incompetent her worst moments are, just like there's no coincidence that they're shoved all the way towards the back of her book, right before she makes her lazy marketing pitch for the sequel. There was a better book waiting to be written here, and the fact that it wasn't written speaks volumes for what Bardugo thinks of her craft, and of her audience. It says what she really cares about—and it says how little she cares about anything else.
I can't remember a book ever losing my trust quite as quickly, or quite as unexpectedly, as Ninth House did in its last several chapters. Early on, I was determined to overlook the gross feeling of its marketing sheen—an author's got to sell herself, right? Closing in on the end, I was frustrated that that oily sheen never went away, and that the plot strings Bardugo was tugging at were so barely concealed, so rote, so void of substance... and I was still convinced—convinced!—that I would be happily buying its sequel and following along. It was only at the very end that I found myself incapable of good faith. The trust Ninth House had built with me—and it had built ample trust—was squandered brutally and senselessly. I felt like a sucker, for letting myself believe the book I was reading could have been better.
No: I felt like a sucker for wanting the book to be better. It felt like, in Ninth House's final moments, I was being scornfully mocked for hoping for the best. How dare I expect something even slightly less slovenly done? Bardugo had provided me with the trappings of a quality novel: the stylish writing, the inventive world, the intriguing cast of characters. In doing that, she suggested that this was all that made for good writing: glib sentences, a world worth building a wiki around, character hooks for my pending fanfiction. The reveals were Big, weren't they? The themes were Gritty? I'd been given all kinds of excuses to post TikToks gushing about Ninth House, all kinds of things to bring up in casual conversation with my friends where I'd enthuse all about its many, many qualities, as if "qualities" were just bullet points in a future marketing pitch, as if the point of a "quality" was to be piled up alongside other qualities in an ironically quantitative way.
There's nothing new to a literary era being defined by bullshit marketing exercises: that's been true of every era since mass publishing was first invented. And there's similarly nothing new to authors who know how to craft the bullshit pretense of "quality," tailored to whatever their era's definition of "good" happens to look like. There are plenty of books that look and feel like highbrow literature, despite being utterly vacuous. There are many of authors who've been lauded for their ability to land tremendous audiences, and hailed as voices of their generation, only to be completely forgotten a decade later. Leigh Bardugo isn't pretending even to that much. All she promised was a dark, sexy, gritty fantasy that wasn't, for once, vacuous junk.
I'm disappointed that I let myself believe her. And I'm disappointed that I let myself get suckered in by something that, on some level, I suspected was out to sucker me. But what frustrates me is that, when I have an experience like this, it makes me that much less willing to trust new authors, or new works. It frustrates me that reading Ninth House means I might be too suspicious or jaded or cynical to give a better book a try. And it frustrates me that, in a world where books like Ninth House are as popular and as lauded as they are, people have less of a reason to expect better, or to look for better, or to want better. It sucks that this is what we think is good—not because it isn't very nearly good, not even because it could have been good and wasn't, but because it's bad in a way that suggests its author very clearly feels that "good" isn't worth pursuing to begin with. It's a book that never could have been as bad as it wound up being if "good" had mattered in the slightest. And the fact that it works so hard to provide the trappings of "good," without bothering to even halfass the actual work of being good, feels vastly grosser than if Ninth House had let itself be bad to begin with. Misspelled fantasy dragon smut has more self-respect.