Leigh Bardugo Storms the Gates of Hell with 'Ninth House' Sequel

Goodreads: Hell Bent was so imaginative and fun. How did you start writing fantasy? 

Leigh Bardugo: I started when I was in junior high school. My mom had just remarried. We had just moved, and I was going to this new school. I felt like I had crash-landed on an alien planet. I didn't feel like I spoke the language. I didn't understand the people around me. 

Things were very hard for me at home. They were very hard for me at school. And that was all there was. That's your life when you're 11, 12, 13 years old. You live in this very tight world, and it's hard to see what life may be like beyond that. 

I walked into my school library, and there was a big table of books and a little sign that read “Discover new worlds.” It was all science fiction and fantasy classics. I picked up Dune and never looked back. For me, I needed to believe that there were other worlds, that there was a life beyond the one I was living where being prepared and smart and clever was more important than being like everybody else. 

Being cute and popular and cheerful—I was none of those things— so I needed to know that there was more waiting for me. That's what fantasy and science fiction gave me. Writing became a kind of survival mechanism with how I processed my feelings. It was how I escaped, and it was also how I began to expand my world and my understanding of it.

GR: Where did you get the idea for Hell Bent and Ninth House?

LB: The series was born in my undergraduate days [at Yale]. I have a very clear memory of walking home, and to my left was a giant mausoleum the size of an apartment building—this huge, white, marble thing. It had a black wrought-iron fence that had iron snakes crawling over it. Then to my right were the gates to the Grove Street cemetery. Above those was a huge plinth inscribed with the words “The dead shall be raised.” And I was thrilled. 

I was probably 18 at the time. It seemed like I had arrived in a place of tremendous mystery lurking beneath this college campus. That building turned out to be Book and Snake, which is one of the ancient eight (secret societies). From then on, I was fascinated with the societies. I had this idea that I wanted to tell a story about the societies where power that was located that wouldn't just about your social connections, economic influence.… It would actually be store houses of arcane knowledge and the occult. 

This seemed like a very fun idea to me. When I started digging deeper into my research and started excavating my own past, it turned into a very different story. 

I left everybody on a cliff-hanger with Ninth House. I had ideas about where I wanted to end up, but in terms of the process that was going to get there, that was the result of digging into some research into ideas of heaven and hell, particularly before Dante and pre-Christian ideas of the afterlife.

GR: When you started Ninth House, did you always know that it would have a sequel?

LB: Yes. I originally thought I'd like to write 12 books in the series. I imagined it as a detective series, where Alex would be in college, and then she would graduate, and she would be solving supernatural crimes. Then I thought, “Well, maybe five is more realistic.” When I realized how long it takes me to write these books, and how intensive the research is, I decided on three. So this is the second book in a trilogy, and it will all close out with the third book. At least, that's my plan right now.

GR: How would you summarize Hell Bent in a few sentences?

LB: At the end of Ninth House, Alex has a theory that Darlington is trapped in hell and that he has become a demon in order to survive there. She sets the task before herself and Dawes to rescue him. But stealing a soul out of hell is not an easy proposition, the first part of that being how do you actually get there? Where to find a doorway to hell? Then, as it turns out, this is a task Alex very much cannot accomplish on her own. The story is both about that journey to hell, trying to find a way to bring Darlington back, but also Alex beginning to rely on the people around her more and discovering the impact of her own powers and the limits of her own power. And I threw in a few murders, too.

GR: One of the things that impresses me so much about your fiction is that you have so many different story lines going on, and you don't leave a loose end. What is your process? How do you keep track of everything,

LB: My process on these books is a little different than my process on my young adult books. When I'm writing YA, I tend to write a “zero draft.” I charge through and just try to maintain momentum as I move from plot beat to plot beat, and then circle back to make it into a proper book. 

What I have is less of a draft and more of a very elaborate outline in front of me. For example, the zero draft of Six of Crows was 30,000 words long, and the final draft was 130,000 words long. It's a very short book, and that's essentially me writing down everything I know about the story and trying to see the shape of it. 

With both Ninth House and Hell Bent, I wrote them in chunks. I'm usually working on these books between other projects. I had to write Hell Bent while writing Rule of Wolves and The Lives of Saints and working on production of the second season of Shadow and Bone. I never had time to just be in the book until the very end. 

There are so many moving pieces, and so many plots and different kinds of mysteries to unravel, both plot-based mysteries and character-based mysteries. That's what excites me. There's the plot that's operating, there's a murder mystery that's operating, there's a quest to pull off this hell heist, but what you cannot accomplish and solve any of those mysteries without unraveling the human mystery first. And there are multiple human mysteries because I brought these other characters to the fore in Hell Bent.

GR: I like what you just said with this being a hell heist. That could have been an alternate title for this—did you consider others?

LB: Originally, the title was going to be Gentleman Demon. I loved that title, but it didn't quite suit the feeling of the book, and particularly Alex, who is a brawler. She will go to fists and sarcastic retorts, whereas Darlington is the true gentleman of Lethe. Hell Bent suited her much more. 

GR: Was there any pushback for having “hell” in the title? 

LB: No, and I've wondered about that. I've seen some plans for posters and so forth. I do wonder if we will not be having displays in store windows, certainly not in some libraries, because of the title. But my publisher certainly didn't balk. And I was glad about that.

GR: Getting back to the secret societies at Yale: I read that you were a member of Wolf's Head. Can you say more about the mythology behind these secret societies and how they informed these books?

LB: The societies are a funny proposition. They're called secret societies, but they've built these tombs or club houses all over campus that could not be more conspicuous. You literally have a giant mausoleum, a giant Egyptian temple, a big Tudor house with no markings and on streets they don’t belong. 

There's a strange push-and-pull between the desire to be secret about what you're doing, but also make sure you're letting everybody know how spectacular your arcane doings are. The societies grew out of the fact that Phi Beta Kappa had originally been a secret society. And there was a huge pushback against anything like that, so Phi Beta Kappa said, “Never mind, we're demystifying, we're not secret anymore.” And a bunch of guys at Yale were like, “No, we love to be secret, it’s super special and fancy. And we refuse to lose that.” So they started Skull and Bones. 

When I was at Yale, I was very fortunate because it put me into a group of people I do not think I would have encountered otherwise. I was able to form very deep connections with people who were very outside of my existing social circle. A lot of things have been written to demystify the societies, and my role was to hyper-mystify them. 

GR: How do you do your research for your books, particularly the magic and the descent to hell? Is this based on anything or just your imagination?

LB: I always start with a touchstone of research because it gives me some place to go. You never really know exactly where the ideas are going to come from. In terms of researching New Haven and Yale, I visited there twice. It was kind of a revelation because I had gone there to research Yale, and I ended up falling in love with New Haven. I got a much better understanding of this place that I had spent four years of my life and had never bothered to get to know in a real way.
 
The lead-up to what hell should be and what shape it should take, and what shape the descent to hell should take, that was born out of reading. There's a book called Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante that was part of what sparked my interest. Ideas around the idea of a portal to the afterlife, and specifically to a hell-like afterlife exist across almost all cultures. And that [portal and journey] became the focal point for how I was going to build the book.

GR: Hell Bent has a lot of haunting. There is a theme of how you never leave the past behind. For example, Alex has her life in Los Angeles follow her to New Haven. What were you hoping to convey?

LB: One of the things I like to do most in my work is to take things that are figurative and make them literal. That goes all the way back to Shadow and Bone with a darkness that falls across the land. What if that darkness was real? What if that was a real place and a real dark territory that you had to cross in some way? 

I wanted to take the idea of one's personal demons and the past returning to haunt you and find a way to make that literal. I don't really believe that trauma is something that you get over in the space of 400 pages. That's something that appeals to us in fiction: this idea that we are going to go through a particular adventure, we're going to meet the right people, we're going to experience the right things, and that is going to heal the wound in us.

My experience has been that whether it's something difficult from your past, or grappling with something like depression, that thing keeps coming back. There can be a desire in us to say we failed in some way. We went to therapy, we did some meditation, we drank some tea, and now we're well. And that's just not the way life works. 

I wanted to address that in the sense of how we deal with these old ghosts. And for me, too, I wanted to crack open the lives of the people around Alex because it can be easy for her to see them as people who have led more easy, more fortunate, more stable lives. In some cases, that's true, but in some cases, they're carrying their own damage.

GR: The relationships that develop in this book: You've got some strong female friendships and then a case of opposites attracting with Darlington and Alex. How do you develop your characters and their relationships? What informs that?

LB: I'm always taken by surprise by my characters. “When I built Alex” sounds like I made her in a lab. But when I was thinking about Alex's past and her circumstances, I wanted to create a character who had no threads to tether her. All of those had been snipped. She doesn't have a strong family structure that could give her stability. She’s been adrift and dealing with everything on her own for a very long time. 

In Ninth House, we see her tentatively begin to weave new relationships with different people. Some of that happens with Darlington, but those threads are roughly cut short, both through external forces and her own inaction or desire not to take action in a given moment. 

Some of those are formed with Dawes. That's when Dawes really stepped to the forefront. Dawes is the graduate student who is forever working on her dissertation. She's a house cat who likes to stay isolated, who has trouble connecting with people. It was only when I started writing her interactions with Alex that she came alive for me and became one of my favorite characters to write, and probably the character that I see myself in the most. 

But also, everybody in the book, whether it's Dawes or Turner or Mercy or Alex or Darlington, have very different relationships to magic, to law, to the city that they live in, to Yale, and to the societies. All those things are at play and become much more interesting to explore when you put those people in the same room together.

GR: You mentioned friendship, family, magic, law. What else do you think is important in this story?

LB: Survival. 

That's the kind of thing that you see when you suddenly step back from your work and see a pattern throughout. That was the thing that emerged for me and understanding the way I write protagonists and the way that they come up against the world. 

Alex says in the first book, "I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me."

That has become my touchstone in terms of understanding not just her character but all the people around her. Even a place like New Haven, which is a complicated city and has been both built up and eroded by the presence of this university. That's running through all of this, whether you're talking about a given individual, a given relationship, or even a building, or structure, or a town.

GR: Absolutely, survival. So why is magic important in our lives and important to survive?

LB: Oh man, you're asking a fantasy fan that!

When I write about Darlington and his relationship to magic and books—that's me. I think that's every fantasy fan; we are raised on this diet of possibility. And then the world seems to contract and wants to deny us that possibility. 

But for fantasy readers, that appetite never goes away. We are always going to be the people for whom the call box is bigger on the inside, who are always waiting to have the magical mentor appear and take us to the secret school or take us away to excavate some extraordinary gifts that we didn't know we had. We're always seeing something in the dark places in the woods, under a bridge, at the top of a skyscraper. We see these secret worlds around us. And I would be so sorry to live without that. 

In some ways, Ninth House and Hell Bent are very much about not giving that up. But they're also about the price that magic extracts, because at the end of the day, magic is just another kind of power. It is no different from economic influence, political influence, social influence. That kind of influence is hoarded by people and abused by people. I wanted to treat magic in the exact same way that we would treat any of those other kinds of influence.



GR: That's wonderful. And your names—Galaxy Stern, Darlington, Dawes—how did you come up with them? 

LB: I wanted a hippie, new age name that had been given to her, but she wouldn't have to carry around with her through the whole book. I don't remember how this one came to me, but it fit instantly. Same with Darlington's name. I knew that it wasn't his real name. His real name is Daniel Arlington. But I thought, ‘That's the way people build an email,’ and so forth. So that would be a natural thing, and it just sounded right to me. 

When I was naming the Bridegroom, I was looking for something that felt historical and like it belonged to a particular moment in New Haven history. It’s hard for me to say. I go through multiple iterations until I find the right one. But with Ninth House, a lot of them showed up fully formed, like Dawes and Darlington and Alex.

GR: Very neat. In this magical realm, we have wheelwalkers, we have vampires, we have witches, we have demons. Is there a social metaphor here?

LB: Magical creatures always operate as metaphor. They can't operate any other way; they were born out of superstition. They were born out of fear. That's where these legends come from. They come from ideas of desire that frighten us. They come from ideas of death that frighten us. Whatever creature is moving through the world, whatever power is moving through the world of these novels, is operating in that tradition as well.

GR: You mentioned Dune—do you have a favorite fantasy book? 

LB: Whoa, buddy. Um, I can't give you one—for magical realism, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. For epic fantasy, I'm gonna go with A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin. For…I don't even know what to call it…Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It’s impossible for me to name a favorite book; it's maybe the cruelest task you can set before a writer.

GR: To build on that and cruel tasks, do you have a favorite of all the books you've written? 

LB: My favorite book is usually the one that I've just finished. Because it's done. Because the trauma is over, but also because with every book, I'm trying to set a new challenge for myself. And I desperately always want to be working to be a better writer. Sometimes that is incredibly frustrating, because I'll come up with an idea and then I feel like I can't do it justice. And sometimes it's thrilling because I know for a fact that I'm a better writer than I was at the start. And I guess every every new book is sort of like, OK, we made it through that. That particular challenge that we set for ourselves. Let's see what's next.

GR: Who is your ideal reader or ideal age group in terms of your audience? Whom do you write for? 

LB: I write the story that I want to write that I think best serves and honors the characters and the themes in the book. I'm thrilled for anybody to discover those stories. People come to books for different reasons. Sometimes they want to feel fired up by a book, sometimes they want to feel like a book is a place of comfort and solace. Ninth House doesn't slot neatly into a category, right? It's a thriller. It's a mystery. It's horror. It's dark fantasy. It's dark academia. But it doesn't fit perfectly into any of those categories. Anytime a reader finds it, and it's what they want and it feeds them, I'm happy.

GR: What books are you reading now?

LB: I was lucky enough to just read two books for critique from two of my friends—one is by Sarah Rees Brennan and one is by Kelly Link. They're both spectacular. I also am reading a book of poetry, Donika Kelly's collection Bestiary. I actually found that through an Instagram account called @poetryisnotaluxury.

GR: Is the third book in this trilogy finished?

LB: No. I don't jump from book to book in a series. I like to have a palate cleanser between them. It gives me a chance to let the ideas come. But the wait between Ninth House and Hell Bent was long, so my goal is to make sure it is much shorter for the third book in the trilogy.

GR: Final question: What would you want your readers to know about Hell Bent? What have I missed?

LB: I'd like them to know the book is fun. People always talk about the darkness of these books—dark magic, dark academia, dark, dark. To me, they're fun books. And I think Hell Bent is especially fun, because it’s on a very specific kind of adventure. And because I've brought together this most peculiar team. It opened some doors that were closed in Ninth House. I'd like them to know that it is very full of action, very full of weird jokes, and I hope they’ll want to come with me to hell.