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Books like Hell Bent

Leigh Bardugo · 2023 · US · fantasy
Book 2 of 2 in Alex Stern
★ 4.11 Goodreads · 197,730 ratings

A Yale student drawn into a secret society that polices the boundary between the living and the dead returns for a second, darker mission.

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12 books for readers of Hell Bent

The Coven

Harper L. Woods and Adelaide Forrest · 2023 · US 98% match ★ 3.50 Hardcover · 107 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Coven of Bones
shares: dark academia, occult, campus, school · easy read, story-driven

Willow Madizza, raised to be a weapon against the Coven that governs Hollow's Grove, enrols at its secret university for witches to find the bones of her ancestors and reclaim her magic, and finds herself at war with its ruthless headmaster, Alaric Thorne.

Vicious

V. E. Schwab · 2013 · US 95% match ★ 4.17 Goodreads · 349,096 ratings
Book 1 of 2 in Villains
shares: dark academia, campus · easy read, suspenseful

Victor and Eli, brilliant, arrogant college roommates, discover that a near-death experience can give a person extraordinary abilities, and ten years later Victor breaks out of prison determined to find his old friend, who is now hunting everyone else with powers.

Chosen Ones

Veronica Roth · 2020 · US 94% match ★ 3.58 Goodreads · 28,427 ratings
shares: urban fantasy, trauma · speculative, easy read

Ten years after five teenagers prophesied to save the world defeated the Dark One, Sloane, one of them, still can't move on, and then the chosen ones are pulled into another world.

The Book of Love

Kelly Link · 2024 · US 94% match ★ 3.54 Goodreads · 12,484 ratings
shares: afterlife, New England · uncanny, speculative

A year after they vanished and were presumed dead, three teenagers reappear in their music teacher's classroom in the coastal town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, and no one can explain where they have been.

The Cloisters

Katy Hays · 2022 · US 92% match ★ 3.38 Goodreads · 75,934 ratings
shares: dark academia, occult, school · earnest, intimate

Ann Stilwell, fresh from a small college in Washington State, takes a summer job at The Cloisters, the Met's museum of medieval art in New York, where a curator and his assistant are researching the history of tarot.

Katabasis

R. F. Kuang · 2025 · US 92% match ★ 3.71 Goodreads · 214,727 ratings
shares: dark academia, afterlife, school · speculative, uncanny

Cambridge graduate student Alice Law needs her brilliant, cruel adviser, Professor Jacob Grimes, to secure her future in magick, but he has died in an accident she may have caused, so she sets out for Hell to bring him back, with her rival Peter Murdoch.

Rosemary and Rue

Seanan McGuire · 2009 · US 92% match ★ 3.78 Goodreads · 40,914 ratings
shares: urban fantasy, murder · speculative, easy read

October Daye, a changeling private investigator in San Francisco who lost fourteen years transformed into a fish, is forced back into the world of Faerie when a countess is murdered.

The Atlas Six

Olivie Blake · 2020 · US 91% match ★ 3.53 Goodreads · 290,947 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in The Atlas
shares: dark academia, school · speculative, intimate

Every ten years the Alexandrian Society, keeper of the lost knowledge of ancient civilisations, invites six young magicians to compete for five places, and this cycle's recruits must spend a year together in its London manor.

A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik · 2020 · US 91% match ★ 3.93 Goodreads · 233,842 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in The Scholomance
shares: dark academia, school · speculative, suspenseful

At the Scholomance, a school for wizards with no teachers and no holidays, only monsters that eat the students, a prickly girl with a talent for mass destruction tries very hard not to use it.

Tithe

Holly Black · 2002 · US 91% match ★ 3.68 Goodreads · 110,979 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Modern Faerie Tales
shares: urban fantasy · speculative, easy read

Kaye, sixteen, who drifts around with her rock-singer mother, moves back to her grandmother's house in New Jersey and finds herself caught up in a war between the faerie courts.

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold · 2002 · US 91% match ★ 3.86 Goodreads · 2,492,639 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, murder · easy read, earnest

A fourteen-year-old girl murdered in a Pennsylvania cornfield narrates, from an in-between heaven, the decade her family spends coming apart around her empty place.

The Secret History

Donna Tartt · 1992 · US 90% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 1,137,632 ratings
shares: dark academia, campus, New England, school · intimate, suspenseful

A scholarship student from California joins an insular circle of classics students at a Vermont college, and their experiments with Dionysian ritual end in a death they cover up with a murder.