I scarcely have the words for this stupendous novel, whose visceral horror is only matched by its eloquence. (I should probably say, “elegant eloquence”, because its power comes in part from the way its gross splatter in terms of content is recounted in so artful a prose style). I have read horror fiction by Cassandra Khaw before — she is Malaysian, but currently lives in Canada; her day job is as a game designer — but she surpasses herself in this new book.
I guess you can say that Hellebore, where the novel takes place, is the anti-Hogwarts. It’s a school for young practitioners of magic, only the magic here is entirely violent, destructive, and feral. The narrator and protagonist, Alessa Li (a name with the same syllabic pattern as the name of the author), has the magical power of tearing bodies apart: a power she first discovers when she uses it in self-defense against her stepfather, who tries to molest her. But there is no innocence in the world of this novel: Alessa has no sense of being a victim, and she sees no distinction between self-protection and aggression. She claims that all the people she killed deserved it, but not that she was always defending herself. It is almost as if the novel is telling us: ‘oh, you say that there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families? You say that the world thrives through competition, all against all? Well, I will show you what that is really like’.
We get a backstory for the novel, contemptuously dumped by the narrator in a single page, telling us how magic thrived in the older world, but was driven underground by the rationalism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. These years were characterized by people’s craving to “cut the cosmos open and see what was inside.” This led to what we know as modernity, “a revolution in human thinking. We went from soothsayers to science, gods to generating electricity. Our lifespans grew; childbirth stopped being a macabre lottery.” The narrator’s point is that this flourishing of rationality, involving the absolute rejection of an earlier world of magic, for all its benefits was itself a sadistic drive to dominate the world. Rationalism and enlightenment were as barbaric as magic itself. And so, after “these years of frenzied development, interspersed with decades of war”, by a sort of inevitable backlash the magic returned. It quickly became a problem, because “this plague of global re-enchantment led to a decimation of the workforce… Capitalism was unsustainable without bodies to feed to the machine”.
What I have just summarized is passed over quite quickly in the novel. But it seems important to me because it sets up everything that follows. Alessa is not admitted to the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted by some owl messenger; rather, she is brutally kidnapped, and finds herself there against her will. She tries to escape, but discovers that this is impossible. The students are nasty, and continually bicker with one another; but the faculty is even worse. I think this resonates with the actual world in which I live, and in which I read the novel: what Fredric Jameson once called “the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital” is extremely difficult to grasp in objective, cognitive terms; rather, it is experienced on the subjective, individual level in the form of neofeudalism (as Jodi Dean and many others have argued). Although social relations are, in their overall structure, highly abstract and highly mediated, we experience these relations in the most immediate, visceral, and personal or sub-personal terms, through vast hierarchies of mastery and subordination. While the social world as a whole may be governed by ineluctable and inscrutable laws, as is envisioned and explored in Kafka’s texts of a century ago, today my individual experience of these structures is a partial and extremely localized one: the power to which I am unwillingly subjected is embodied, immediate, and directly branded into my flesh.
Khaw only intimates this historical background. For the most part, The Library at Hellebore narrates body horror as it fills the register of immediate experience. Everybody at Hellebore, student or faculty, is a monster: “someone with the potential to destroy the world three times over, and still have time for a good long brunch”. Put a lot of such people together, and they will both ally with one another and brutalize one another. Everything horrific about them will be cultivated and drawn out by the faculty, intent on shaping them into their worst selves.
But there’s even more. The novel mostly takes place at a crisis point. At the end of the school year, when the students graduate, the faculty devour them in a cannibalistic orgy. Many of the novel’s chapters are marked as “Before”, and give an account of the entire year Alessa spends at Hellebore. But these sections are interspersed with chapters set in the present: a few students have escaped being consumed, and they barricade themselves in the school library, doors locked so the faculty cannot enter. (They still have to deal, within the library itself, with the Librarian, a monster with the face of a human woman, but with a long caterpillar-like body). As the students try to defend themselves, and also fight among themselves, Khaw’s glittering prose (I can only call it that) details a seemingly unending series of wounds and aggressions, spillings of blood and gore and internal organs. But these are accompanied by subtle internal, affective shifts: moments of fear, but also moments of caring and (strange as it may seem) intimacy.
The realm of fear and violence is also, subtly, a realm of affection and sensitivity, in which Alessa and her peers experience surprising moments of otherness-contact, or what the philosopher Joseph Libertson called proximity. These moments are expressed in prose that is surprisingly delicate and subtle, even as it describes sheer atrocity. For instance, at one moment Alessa describes experiencing “a vertiginous sensation half like food poisoning and half like the worst migraine ever…” Something like this is as much excitingly unfamiliar as it is excruciating; and this is the way that the prose of the novel moves us forward, although what it describes is unremittingly horrific and bleak. Even at its most caustic — as when Alessa says that “years spent around men who believed that their dicks were reliquaries taught me how to smile despite the wave of nausea rolling through me” — the novel’s language is carefully exploratory, and illuminating in its precision and lack of pretense.
This extends even to the strange intimacy and recognition that sometimes passes between Alessa and the other monsters:”Minji smiled thinly and we sat then in a new silence, aware we had, very companionably and without a shred of animosity in our hearts, declared, in fewer words than perhaps were merited, that we would eventually be at each other’s throats. Whether such a time would come to pass was irrelevant. The words couldn’t be taken back and a sliver of me would always regret our honesty in that moment.”
Such quivering sensitivity at the heart of brutality is what really makes the novel work for me. I would not want to live in the world imagined by Khaw; but the really disturbing thing about the book is how insidiously it insists that, most likely, I already do. The few vestiges of saving grace the novel offers us only make sense in the context of its overall frightening vision; this is what is most deeply disturbing about it. Monstrosity is not an intervention from the Outside (as it is, for instance, in Lovecraft’s stories), rather, it is as intimate as my relation to my neighbor, or even as intimate as my relation to myself.