This Ghost Story Is a Cutting Commentary on Rape Culture

“There is a big difference between things being fair and things being set right.”

So says Galaxy “Alex” Stern, the protagonist in beloved fantasy author Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. Bardugo, a well-known writer whose Shadow and Bone trilogy was adapted into a hit Netflix show, presents a supposedly formulaic ghost story that ends up revealing a cutting commentary about rape culture and a metacriticism of the male-dominated fantasy genre.

In the real world, patriarchy and rape culture are a constant backdrop in the lives of women and femmes. This violence, and its likelihood of befalling us, is interwoven into every setting we occupy and decision we make. Women begin getting cat-called when we are still children. We can’t go out, be online, go to high school or college, or even do our jobs without being sexually harassed or assaulted. It seems obvious that being a woman who is also capable of seeing and interacting with dead people would only ramp up the number of potential ways to be attacked, especially given that ghosts are completely invisible to the rest of the world and thus the justice system. In a world like this, how would a woman ever find peace, justice, and safety as a survivor?

This is the world of Ninth House, and one that protagonist Alex Stern is determined to set right. The story is told non-chronologically and takes readers through a series of perspective changes and flashbacks. The persistent tone of repeated violence against women in both reality and from beyond the veil is bitingly demonstrated when the book quickly reveals a flashback from when Alex got her first period on a junior high school field trip. Until this incident, Alex had been simply ignoring the ghosts (which are called “greys” throughout the book) that she saw everywhere she went, finding that she had to hide her powers in order to pass as normal, sane, and accepted. But when an unprepared Alex goes to the bathroom on that trip, she is raped by a grey. A teacher discovers Alex seemingly alone in the bathroom, fighting against the air. Alex is disbelieved and ostracized in ways that are devastatingly familiar to all young women: Nobody saw her attacker, therefore she must be lying, crazy, and altogether worthy of collective torment and alienation. Like many women who are crushed by institutional and social betrayal after their assaults, Alex struggles with her mental health and the burden of her anger at rape culture, and she eventually falls further into danger and violence. She drops out of school and is sexually trafficked by her older “boyfriend” starting at age 15. Her abuse is messy, horrifying, and imperfect. It doesn’t fit neatly in one category. Child abuse? Yes. Trafficking? Yes. Rape? Yes. In that, Leigh has crafted a remarkably realistic survivor. Many survivors are victimized multiple times. Many survivors exist in margins that don’t match society’s understanding of rape or abuse. And many survivors do ugly, perilous things to, well, survive.

After surviving a mysterious triple homicide involving the groomer boyfriend, Alex is invited to Yale on a scholarship from a secret occult society that is interested in her “gift” to see greys. Like many institutional gestures to survivors, the society’s intentions are less than pure. They studied Alex from afar starting when she was a child, deemed her unworthy of their help and solidarity, and left her to fend for herself until her powers were useful to them following the homicide — an echo of high schools and colleges throwing survivors to the wolves until it’s a good PR move for them to “support” women. Upon finding out from the society that they could have taught her a way to repel greys earlier and chose not to, Alex smashes the expensive dishes in one of the society’s safe houses on campus. Alex refuses to feel grateful for such late intervention; she asks her upperclassman mentor if he understands what it would’ve meant to her to keep her safe. It’s clear that the mentor, Darlington, who serves as a parallel to Leigh’s metacriticism of the fantasy genre’s ignorance of the obvious patriarchal horror that women would face if ghosts were indeed real, hadn’t considered this.

When all of the book’s narrative timelines finally meet, it’s a disquieting and awe-inspiring series of twists that hit all at once, driving home the question of justice, belonging, and what it means to be a survivor in a world that repeatedly attempts to destroy Alex and girls like her. Similar to the truth that real-world survivors discover, Alex faces the fact that there is not just one villain in her story, but many — the men who have assaulted her and her friends, the agents of institutions that have enabled violence and selectively supported survivors, and even the women who have “forged [their] new path from the lives of other girls, poor girls, immigrant girls, brown girls, girls like me” in the name of turning it into a “feminist manifesto,” as if breaking a glass ceiling can cover the blood on their hands.

Alex’s vision of justice and her fight for survival are intertwined. If things were fair, she wouldn’t be in the position that she is, she wouldn’t be revictimized over and over, and her life would be different. But things are not fair. If things were fair, young women wouldn’t grow up in a world where college is “the hunting ground,” they wouldn’t have to experience constant harassment and always calculate their behavior, their clothes, and even the tone in which they say “no” to avoid angering someone. Ninth House may be a fantasy novel, but its complex exploration of survivorship and justice in a world of rape culture is very, very real.