Unquiet
Things

With each new book I read from Cassandra Khaw, I fall more in love with their visceral irreverence. Here, they’ve taken dark academia tropes and soaked them in gore and body horror. The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is a school for the dangerously gifted, the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. These aren’t students who blithely levitate pencils or conjure a bit of fire. They’re capable of ending civilizations. One can tear reality apart with their voice. Another transforms into something with too many teeth and mouths and eyes and hunger that can’t be satisfied. One might be the son of the literal devil. Also, one of them has something to do with cicadas. It’s a lot!

When Alessa Li gets kidnapped and forcibly enrolled, she’s promised redemption and a normal life after graduation. Instead, on graduation day, the faculty goes on a ravenous rampage and devours the student body. Alessa and a handful of classmates barricade themselves in the library, where they discover they must offer a human sacrifice or the faculty will break down the door and finish what they started.

The narrative jumps between “Before” (Alessa’s time at Hellebore leading up to graduation) and “Days…” (the nightmare of being trapped in the library), which was initially disorienting but that temporal whiplash adds to the nightmarish quality, keeping you off-balance and uncertain about what’s coming. The body horror is relentless and genuinely disturbing; intestines hanging from ceilings, grotesque transformations, unholy, unspeakable violence but actually described in such visceral detail that you feel it all the way down to your toes. Khaw doesn’t flinch away from the gore, and neither should you if you’re going to read this.

The characters are monsters in every sense, literally (they have apocalyptic powers) and figuratively (they’re all varying degrees of morally bankrupt). Alessa herself is an unreliable narrator who presents horrors with this weird mix of disgust and casual coolness that somehow works. None of these people are especially likable, but they’re compelling, and watching them navigate impossible choices while trapped together creates a dreadful trainwreck of claustrophobic intensity that doesn’t let up. I’ve seen reviewers complain about Khaw’s vocabulary—words like “abattoir,” “haruspicy,” “chelicerae,” and “etiolated” — as if having to reach for a dictionary is some kind of personal attack. If encountering unfamiliar words makes you feel stupid, that’s a you problem, not a writing problem. Grow up. Khaw uses language precisely, choosing words that create specific atmospheric effects rather than settling for easier synonyms. The ornate vocabulary isn’t pretentious flourish; it’s deliberate craft that deepens the otherworldly, nightmarish quality of Hellebore itself.

The worldbuilding stays intentionally vague; the magic system has no clear rules, the school’s curriculum barely gets explored, and I think that haziness serves the story perfectly. Not getting bogged down in the mechanics puts the focus on immediacy and urgency. This isn’t about understanding how Hellebore works… it’s about surviving it. The lack of clear rules makes everything more unsettling, more dreamlike, and horrifically unpredictable. After all the butchery and bloodshed, the ending caught me completely off guard, brutal and bold and perfectly fitting for all the chaotic carnage that came before it. This is dark academia cranked to maximum midnight void-darkness and then splattered with heaps of globby entrails (and the impish devilry of those big, hard-to-pronounce words!), and I’m here for every gruesome moment.

ALSO LOOK AT THAT FREAKING GORGEOUS BOOK COVER! I did a bit of digging and I found that the artist for the illustration is Zoë van Dijk. I don’t know about you, but if I see a beautiful book cover, I want to know who created it!

Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Twelve 2024 | Day Twelve 2023 | Day Twelve 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!

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