Summary

Ninth House is told from a third person limited point of view, from the perspective of a girl named Alex. In the prologue, Alex is thinking about how difficult it was to get blood out of her sweater, and then quickly switches to thinking about the arrival of spring. Alex is somewhere called “Old Campus” (1), where she sits and reads in a hidden room within one of the campus buildings. The room is called the Hutch, named as such by a university organization called Lethe House. Alex notes that the Hutch had once been enchanted so that it would smell of clean laundry, confirming the existence of magic within the novel. She then makes an off-handed reference to something called “the incident at the mansion on Orange” (1-2).

Alex is living in the Hutch, surviving off of emergency rations and money left behind...