Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hell Cat | 2020 | H.P. Mallory | Buy |
The 9 Hells series launched with Hell Cat in 2020, a single entry that places the reader in a supernatural underworld setting. The title does double work: a hell cat is both a fiercely aggressive woman and a creature from below, which tells you something about the protagonist before you read a page. H.P. Mallory has used this kind of layered titling throughout her career, whether the puns in the Dulcie O’Neil books or the blunt mythological declarations in the Wolves of Valhalla series.
Hell Cat arrived at a point in Mallory’s career when she was building multiple new series simultaneously, including the NuLife and Wolves of Valhalla storylines. The 9 Hells name suggests a broader mythology waiting to be explored, with the numerical title implying a structured supernatural hierarchy that could sustain multiple books.
For readers who want to try H.P. Mallory’s darker paranormal work, Hell Cat is a single-book commitment that doesn’t require knowledge of her other series. It sits in 2020, after her early witch and fairy detective novels but before her later trailer park paranormal books, making it part of a transitional period in her output when the tone was getting stranger and more experimental.