James Nicoll Reviews

Cassandra Khaw’s 2025 The Library at Hellebore is a just-barely-upcoming (July 22, 2025) horror novel.

Magic has reappeared¹. Across the world, very special people manifest very special abilities. Not all of the very special people choose to use their powers in a socially acceptable way.

Take Alessa Li, for example, who when we meet her has just murdered her adorable roommate, Joanna.

Alessa has a knack for magically dismembering people, a talent she first demonstrated on the father who was trying to rape her. Alessa then conducted a covert education campaign, assisting aggressive men who accosted her to understand that no means no, a concept they embraced at some point during their slow, painful demises.

Although Alessa was cleared of her father’s death, eventually the authorities decided that she was a menace to society. She was detained and enrolled at Hellebore, an educational institution which would direct her abilities in ways useful to the powerful.

Hellebore teaches gifted children… a specific subset of gifted children. It is where the kids with death-touches, the inescapable dooms, casually homicidal, prophets, antichrists and so on and so forth are educated under the watchful eyes of faculty whose true nature does not bear close examination. Years of diligent study will be rewarded with graduation. Or rather, harvesting.

Why waste grand abilities on the young when sufficiently ravenous faculty can assimilate those talents, along with the tasty flesh of the terrified students?

Alessa and a handful of schoolmates survive the initial stages of the faculty’s rampage. The faculty is certain that escape is impossible. The faculty would be well advised to ask ​“for whom?”

~oOo~

In Alessa’s defense, she liquified Joanna to save Joanna from a much worse fate.

Are you surprised that the powers that be at Hellebore turn out to be less than socially conscious, indeed quite self-serving?² Well, this is a Cassandra Khaw novel; the author, like the Cassandra in the Iliad, is known for vivid narratives.

While students may have issues with certain details of the syllabus, one could argue that from a larger perspective, Hellebore serves a useful function. Magic’s return has created many people who present existential threats to the general public³. Hellebore at least reduces their number. It all makes sense, as long as you look at Hellebore not as a school so much as a dangerous materials repository.

If you’re looking for a story about found family, enemies to friends, and the arc of history trending towards justice, this not the novel for you. Many of the characters don’t like each other for good reason, and while they might be forced to ally, defection is always a possibility. Mostly, it’s about flawed people trying to survive the attentions of much worse people, or at least make the worse people regret their life choices.

I did say it was horror.

The Library at Hellebore is available here (Macmillan), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Why did magic go away in the first place? It’s not clear, but given the state of society by the time the book opens, it could be that magic-rich worlds are incredibly unstable and that the magically imbued are fated to destroy each other or themselves. So, a self-solving problem, in the same sense the Azolla event was a self-solving problem: it instigates its own destruction.

USA delenda est.

2: Either she killed both her father and stepfather or at least one character uses imprecise terminology.

3: Not so much Alessa, who is safe enough unless provoked, but your antichrists and death-touchers and such are by their nature dangerous. Possibly on a global scale.