Donna Tartt Meets VE Schwab: Leigh Bardugo’s ‘Ninth House’

“This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realise that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.”

This book takes a forensic microscope to the myriad systemic cancers of the Ivy League with a singular excoriating lens: one of magic and ghosts and demons.

It’s a dark, slow-building storm – gradual rain sweeping in from the ocean, bruise-purple clouds coalescing above until, before you know it, you’re standing at the heart of a tempest, lightning shattering the darkness. Reading this book is like that scene in VE Schwab’s Vicious when Victor dashes from the rooftop as the sky opens while Eli simply tips his head back and lets himself be swallowed by the squall.

The curtain rises with Galaxy “Alex” Stern in her freshman year at Yale – with her tattoo sleeves and inkblot eyes, “too sleek, almost damp, less Undine rising from the waters than a dagger-toothed rusalka” – in her new role as Dante of Lethe, one of the nine secret and ancient houses at the university, each of which use occult magic to influence world events through their elite networks of alumni. The sinister sorcery exercised by the houses ranges from therianthropy at Wolf’s Head, to necromancy at Book & Snake, to the disturbing illusions of Manuscript (looking at you, Jodie Foster).

There’s also an irresistible constellation of relationships caught in Alex’s orbit. At the core of the book is Hellie, “a glowing slice of sun”, the girl she loved, whose story we learn through Alex’s Schwabian flashbacks to the days before her life changed forever. Then there’s Darlington (whose real name is actually Daniel Arlington), as extra as they come, the (literal) Virgil to her Dante, mentoring her in the duties of Lethe, teaching her how to stem the tide of ghosts drawn to the barbaric rituals of the other houses, the grey wave seeping through the cracks in the world like blood through flayed flesh. He’s an esoteric Hufflepuff fusion of Francis Abernathy and Eli Ever and the scene when he bursts out in lines of Virgil’s Eclogues has become one of my all-time favourites.

Shout-outs also to:

• The singular Dawes – Lethe’s “Oculus”, who goes from reticent, ostracised oddity perpetually poring over her Tristram Shandean thesis to Alex’s closest friend and confidante. So often these repressed, introverted, emotionally-guarded characters are written infuriatingly two-dimensionally. Either wraith-like and barely there or saturated with stereotypes. Not so here.
• Mercy Zhao – Alex’s roommate, whose entry essay to Yale was a comparison between Faulkner and a certain scene from The Merchant’s Tale involving a pear tree…
• The austere Professor Belbalm – with her snow-white bob “that looked like it had been carved from bone and set carefully on her head like a helmet, so little did it move.”

The aesthetic exudes tempestuous oceans, ghost-wreathed hellscapes, ancient tombs, blood, bones, rage… and it’s glorious.

Ninth House truly is something of an urban fantasy riff on The Secret History. And, as someone who owns seven editions of the latter, this was always going to be an obsession-in-waiting.

“That was in the spring. But the trouble had begun on a night in the full dark of winter, when Tara Hutchins died and Alex still thought she might get away with everything.”