I love going to author panels at conventions. I will go because I like one of the authors and after listening to all of them talk for an hour, I usually have put a bunch of new books on hold at the library because I’m so intrigued by what I have heard from the new-to-me authors.
I first encountered Cassandra Khaw at a panel at NYCC a few years ago and I thought they seemed really cool. I realized that they had written for one of my favorite D&D sourcebooks, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, so I decided to check out their fiction. I thought their novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth was creepy and interesting, but I really bounced off The Dead Take the A Train, a novel they cowrote with Richard Kadrey (which did not live up to the specific premise in the title, among other issues I had with it).
I was intrigued when the publisher and NetGalley gave me an eARC of her new book in exchange for an honest review. The Library at Hellebore was billed as dark academia, but after recently reading the Scholomance trilogy and Incandescent, this book just felt like warmed over tropes poorly executed with an excess of gore for gore’s sake. The characters were too unlikable and I didn’t care about the plot. This book was not for me.
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