Ninth House

Ninth House is a dark fantasy horror novel by the American writer Leigh Bardugo, published by Flatiron Books in October 2019. It is her first novel for adults.

Alex Stern grows up in the Los Angeles hinterlands with a hippie mother, leaves school early, and by the age of twenty is the only survivor of a multiple homicide that is never solved. She is offered a place at Yale while she is recovering in hospital, which is the second chance the novel turns on, and she arrives as an unlikely member of the freshman class. Her ability to see ghosts is the reason she is there: she has been recruited into Lethe, the ninth house, whose job is to monitor the eight secret societies that practise dangerous occult magic at the university. The novel is largely inspired by Bardugo's own time at Yale, and by her discovery of the tombs belonging to the secret societies on New Haven's Grove Street during her freshman year.

The book was the first in a series, and a sequel, Hell Bent, followed in January 2023. Bardugo had written the young adult Grishaverse novels before turning to a story about a university and the magic practised inside it.