Ninth House Novel Summary and Theme
Galaxy Stern, nicknamed Alex, is a young woman of mixed
heritage living in California with her free-spirited mother. She sees and
interacts with ghosts, which leads her to drug addiction as a means of escape.
By 15, she has dropped out of school and is living with her drug dealer
boyfriend and her best friend, Hellie. At an out of control party, Hellie dies
from overdose after several men rape her. Traumatized and grieving, Alex lets
her best friend’s ghost take over her body and, together, they kill all those
responsible. Afterwards, Alex is hospitalized and arrested, but her ability to
see ghosts brings her to the attention of Yale’s Lethe House, one of the secret
societies dealing with magic; Dean Sandow offers her a new life and a free
ride.
Lethe is the 10th society, laid out to supervise all the
others. Its individuals should go about as shepherds, ensuring that everybody
is leading their customs securely and no understudies or personnel are impacted
by sorcery. The individual responsible for regulating the customs is
customarily an upperclassman who holds the title of Virgil and who prepares a
first-year understudy, or Dante, to assume up their position.
At the point when Alex shows up to Yale, Virgil is Daniel
Arlington, or Darlington, a neighborhood young fellow from a devastated group
of previous industrialists, who has lived alone at a summary house not a long
way from grounds since his granddad's demise quite a while back. Darlington is
known as the "noble man of Lethe" due to his immaculate habits and
upstanding person. His whole life he has been entranced with sorcery and the
mysterious and has fostered a romanticized vision of death and the
extraordinary. Darlington's errand is to prepare Alex to have his spot, however
he is not ready for a road savvy and disgusting young lady of blended legacy
without even a GED. After a rough beginning, nonetheless, Darlington and Alex
figure out how to cooperate and, step by step, come to see each other better.
Following a couple of months, a standard check turns out
badly and Darlington vanishes. Dignitary Sandow accepts an entry has turned out
badly and readies a service to bring the young fellow back at the following new
moon. In any case, the custom appears to come up short and what shows up rather
is a hellbeast, which the dignitary effectively ousts.
Meanwhile, Alex is responsible for ensuring every general
public plays out its ceremonies in a protected way. Nonetheless, she is
overpowered by her homework and frequently arrives behind schedule to
occasions. One night, during a guess custom for anticipating the securities
exchanges through vivisection, Alex sees that the phantoms, or Grays, are
acting in a bizarre way. That very evening, a nearby young lady named Tara is
killed not a long way from the Yale exercise center. Alex researches the case,
as the dead lady helps her firmly to remember her companion Hellie.
The examination seriously endangers Alex when somebody
attempts to kill her. A neighborhood phantom, the Groom, who purportedly killed
his money and afterward himself over 100 years back, helps her out and they
hammer out an agreement. As a trade-off for his finding Tara's soul on the
opposite side, Alex will research the Spouse's case — the phantom accepts that
another person killed him and his life partner Daisy.
Ultimately, Alex figures out that Tara's homicide is the
consequence of Senior member Sandow's requirement for cash after his
separation. One of the social orders lost its central command some time back
and wants another one. Accepting that the power nexuses on which every one of
the Houses stand occurred after the passings of a few young ladies, Dignitary
Sandow organized to kill Tara on an unfilled plot of land. In any case, the
homicide didn't prevail with regards to making a position of force.
At the point when Alex defies Senior member Sandow at the
President's home, another teacher, Marguerite Belbalm, goes along with them and
uncovers that she is, as a matter of fact, Daisy, and that the nexuses are the
consequence of her eating up the spirits of the dead young ladies. She kills
the senior member and endeavors to eat up Alex, however Alex approaches the
dead for help, liberating the spirits the teacher had retained. The more
established lady crumbles.
A couple of days after the fact, at the dignitary's burial
service, Alex imparts to other two young ladies engaged with Lethe that a
hellbeast sent by Senior member Sandow consumed Darlington, who figured out how
to endure the experience and is presently in Damnation in the pretense of a man
of his word evil spirit. Them three intend to bring him back.
The book opens with notices of blood, setting a shocking
state of mind. The main passage presents hero System Harsh, or Alex for short,
who is stayed in a mystery room called the Box on the Yale grounds in
late-winter. The Pen is a space on the second floor of a business fabricating
that has been charmed not to let smells from its different organizations enter
the mystery room.
Alex is genuinely harmed and stowing away from something. To
take a break she peruses whatever is within reach, including the handout
Recommended Prerequisites for Lethe Competitors. From her insights, obviously
Lethe is a House — one of Yale's mysterious social orders managing sorcery. In
the wake of perusing the record and discovering some marginalia, she reviews a
horrible memory — blood on the rug and somebody's white bones standing out.
After her flashback, Alex feels unwell and goes to the
restroom to take a zolpidem pill. While there, she checks out at herself in the
mirror: She is wounded and her tank top is "stained yellow with
discharge" (3). There is a tainted chomp twisted in her side. The intelligent
piece of her psyche is worried about her demolishing state of being, yet she
feels excessively wrecked to make a difference. All things being equal, she
pushes on her injury and blacks out structure the aggravation.
The last paragraph explains that Alex is experiencing the
result of the events that took place several months prior “on a night in the
full dark of winter” when someone named Tara Hutchins died (4).
GALAXY “ALEX” STERN
Alex is the protagonist of the novel. She grew up Los
Angeles, California. Her grandmother is Jewish Ladino and her father is
Hispanic. As a child, she was plump, but as an adult, Alex is thin and wiry,
with long black hair and tattoos covering her arms. She has the ability to see
Greys, or ghosts, which causes her terrible problems as a child and teenager.
Alex has no friends and is bullied at school. Eventually, she discovers that
taking drugs dulls her supernatural affinity, and spirals into addiction. When
her mother Mira tries to force 15-year-old Alex into a rehab center, Alex runs
away from home.
Alex moves in with Len, her drug dealer and boyfriend. Len
expects her to sell and deliver drugs and to prostitute herself for his
benefit. There is no indication in the text that Alex loves or even likes Len,
but she has no other place to go to and being homeless is not an option. Most
of Alex’s feelings revolve around her best friend Hellie; their physical
closeness hints at romantic desire.
After Alex takes deadly supernatural revenge for Hellie’s
rape and death, Yale’s Lethe society recruits her to become its new Dante—a
freshman who apprentices to becomes the head of supernatural policing on
campus. Despite Alex’s lack of academic credentials, her enormous power is too
attractive for the society to resist.
Alex feels solidarity with other young women, and her actions
are typically in service of protecting women who have been hurt, like Daisy,
Mercy, and Hellie.
DANIEL “DARLINGTON” ARLINGTON
Darlington is a senior at Yale who comes from a now
impoverished family of former New Haven industrialists who used to own a
successful rubber boot factory. Darlington was brought up in a big, old mansion
by his strict paternal grandfather and a housekeeper; his parents are too busy
traveling and enjoying their glamorous life in the city. After his
grandfather’s death, Darlington refuses to give up the mansion, spending the
last two years of high school living completely alone on his own and struggling
to sustain himself.
His upbringing and teenage experiences have shaped Darlington
into a self-sufficient, studious, and courteous young man, earning him the
moniker the “Gentleman of Lethe” (172). He has always been fascinated with the
supernatural and almost dies in his first attempt to brew an elixir that would
allow him to see ghosts, desperate to reach into the world beyond. As the
narrator puts it, “he’d run out of things to believe in. Magic was all he had
left” (231). Darlington romanticizes the supernatural and is at first jealous
of Alex’s innate ability. Her lack of reverence for both Lethe and the
supernatural—things he considers to be special—appalls him.
Initially, Darlington serves as a guide and mentor—the
Virgil—to Alex’s novice Dante. However, when he is trapped in Hell, their roles
are reversed, and Alex intends to become his savior.
PAMELA DAWES
Pamela holds the title of Oculus for the Lethe society. She
is a graduate student working on her dissertation on the connections between
Mayan mythology and Tarot cards. Pamela likes her life to be quiet and orderly.
Like Darlington, she feels reverence for Lethe and the
supernatural.
At the beginning of the novel, Pamela and Alex do not get
along. However, after an unapologetic rapist attacks Alex using illegal mind
control magic, Pamela reveals her inner strength when she kills the attacker
and then stands up to a disbelieving Dean Sandow. Like Alex, Pamela has a
strong sense of right and wrong; she is ready to go to great lengths to achieve
justice.
MARGUERITE BELBALM
The true antagonist of the novel, Professor Marguerite Belbalm,
turns out to be the ghost of 19th century young woman who has taken over the
souls and bodies of other young women in order to extend her life and gain
magical power. In her first life as Daisy Fanning Whitlock, she had the same
supernatural power as Alex—the ability to interact with ghosts. Daisy
escaped an unwanted marriage by pushing a ghost into her fiancé, the man who
became the ghostly Bridegroom. When her identity and murderous nature is
revealed, Belbalm explains that people with the ability to see and influence
ghosts are Wheelwalkers; they can create portals into other realms without
extensive rituals.
Belbalm would have been the perfect mentor for Alex—an idea
Belbalm dangles in front of Alex to gain her trust. Alex looks up to Professor
Belbalm as the epitome of a successful and independent woman who does not rely
on any man. However, as it turns out, the professor is a serial killer who has
been grooming Alex as her next victim.
DEAN ELLIOT SANDOW
Sandow, “a small, tidy man with the trim build of a jogger
and silvery brows that steepled at the center of his forehead” (186), is the
dean of one of the Yale colleges, a very prestigious position. He is also a
Lethe alum who fashioned new rituals as a student in the 1970s. After returning
to Yale as an associate professor, he has served as the liaison between Lethe
and the university president. He is recently divorced from his wife whom he
“nursed through two bouts of cancer” (424).
On the surface, the dean seems like a fatherly figure, but he
turns out to be a murderous villain. To pay off the divorce and alimony costs,
Sandow promises to find the St. Elmo’s society a clubhouse on a new source of
magic power called a nexus. Believing that nexuses form after young women are
murdered, he kills a young woman named Tara, sends a hellbeast after Alex and
Darlington to keep them off his trail, and engineers several attacks on Alex.
His confession at the novel’s end shows that he is just as selfish and uncaring
as most of the other men depicted in the book.
Ninth House Themes
PRIVILEGE AND RESPONSIBILITY
The theme of privilege and responsibility shapes the novel’s
world.
Many characters in the clever show no comprehension of the
results of their activities, too gullible or excessively self centered to feel
liable for their way of behaving. The youngsters at Yale can bear to act
severely without being rebuffed for their wrongdoings — Blake assaults a more
youthful person for sport, and the students. In the mean time, in L.A., Len and
his street pharmacist companions are additionally without any awareness of
others' expectations towards more youthful ladies in their circle. Len damages
to Hellie for his own progression in his criminal association. The principal
contrast among Len and Blake is honor. The college safeguards Blake on account
of his athletic abilities, while Len needs to find his own all the more
remarkable defenders in the higher-positioning figures of his medication
managing ring.
Alex is the main person who has direct insight of the two
universes: destitution and chronic drug use, and riches and honor. Her
encounters permit her a reasonable view and comprehension of the inadequacies
of Yale, taken cover behind its lavish design and style. Alex holds her feeling
of obligation in her new life at Yale, seeing what is fair and just and
battling for the proper thing. It is Alex's awareness of certain expectations
towards Hellie and Tara, two unfortunate ladies without associations, that
prompts her unwinding the well established debasement riddling Lethe.
FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE
Friendship and loyalty trigger the major events in the novel.
Furious at losing her best friend Hellie, Alex allows her ghost to possess and
commit multiple murders—a spectacular display of supernatural powers that
catches the attention of Yale’s Lethe society. Exacting vengeance for her
roommate Mercy’s rape leads Alex to battle the murderous Blake. Pamela’s
friendship with Alex motivates Pamela to defend Alex and cause Blake’s death.
Romantic love is mostly absent in the novel, which features a
chain of failed love stories, including Alex’s parents and Alex’s connection
with Len and Hellie. The only explicit example is the Bridegroom’s love for
Daisy, but this is just a romanticized illusion: He had not known his fiancée
at all and, consequently, his love for her could not have been real. Alex’s
feelings for Darlington could be the one exception, but since their emotions
remain unarticulated, we can only speculate about their future.
ADDICTION AND DRUGS
Enslavement in the original comes in many structures. Alex's
chronic drug use is a method for packing down her enchanted powers. Her mom
Mira draws a lined up among fixation and her adoration for Alex's dad (402).
The mystery social orders' customs feed ethically dark requirements through
rehashed hindering demonstrations. Tara and her beau utilize the illegal
substances they develop to get away from the limits of their impasse lives
genuinely. At last, Darlington's most memorable effort to mix an elixir in
spite of the peril recommends that he is dependent on enchantment.
The way that enslavement can take various structures and
isn't restricted to one specific social class questions the disgrace related
with destitution and medications. The way that the general public individuals
fiddling with the powerful are rich and taught doesn't make them unrivaled. As
a matter of fact, the more remarkable a fiend is, the more harm they cause to
everyone around them.
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