Today’s review is about KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang. It’s a standalone fantasy novel. Here, two PhD students decide to try to bring back their professor from hell after a magical accident.
Author: R.F. Kuang
Series: None
Age Category: Adult
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Publish Date: August 26, 2025
Print Length: 560
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Katabasis Synopsis
Synopsis
Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.
Katabasis Review
KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang follows Alice, a PhD student in the field of Magick, into hell in an attempt to bring back her mentor, Professor Grimes, after a magical accident. Unfortunately, her academic rival, Peter, has the same idea. So they embark through the seven levels of hell to find their professor with nothing but their smarts and old texts from which to draw.
KATBASIS is a dark academia speculative fiction (fantasy) book that takes place in 1980s Cambridge. As such, there is a fair amount of mentioning various philosophies or logic puzzles. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the reader must be familiar with all of these references to enjoy the heart and vibes of the story. I’m not versed at all with the concepts mentioned in the book, but I followed along just fine.
The overarching adventure in KATABASIS is to retrieve Professor Grimes from hell. This means experiencing each level and figuring out how to move through it. Kuang does a great job describing the first few levels of hell. But then it feels like Alice and Peter rush through the others. Whether that’s because the author had to cut some text or didn’t think describing their foray into the deeper levels of hell lended much to the story is unknown.
This book also includes themes of sexism, feminism, and competition in academia, which are enmeshed within each other. Women who pursue higher level degrees in academia encounter sexism and lack of support from their male contemporaries. As such, they must work harder and even decide how they want to dress. These decisions tie into feminism and how the women want to portray that, whether it’s through how they dress, befriend other women in the field, or punt any friendships to the side to focus solely on their work. Alice falls more into the latter, feeling that devotion to her work, to her professor, and avoiding the hullabaloo of feminism will get her where she wants to be.
Peter is the archetype of a white, cisgender male who happens to be good at everything he does despite his aloofness. However, if there’s one thing this book does is it shows there’s always more to the story.
KATABASIS also spends a lot of time on the topic of idolization of one’s mentor. This makes one question the culture of academia and whether that’s emotionally healthy. It also sets up an examination of how positions of power influence the vulnerable. However, though Kuang includes such themes, I didn’t feel that there was a lot of time spent examining them. There are certain scenes that leave the reader with a bad taste in their mouth. But overall, the examination is left to the reader.
With respect to the ending (no spoilers), it felt satisfactory, but abrupt considering the lack of development of a certain thing. All in all, though, I expected a little more from KATABASIS considering the hype. I enjoyed my time reading it, but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.
Rating: 3.75
Content warnings: death, emotional abuse, blood, gore, animal death
Reading format: Hardback
There was a lot of hype before the book came out, but it seems the hype has died down? Sorry it didn’t quite meet your expectations. The “levels of Hell” idea is giving me LitRPG vibes which is enough to keep me away from this😉
Yea, you’re right, it seems like the hype has kind of died down. Although, I just saw in an email from B&N that it’s one of their books of the year. I haven’t read a LitRPG book before, but I don’t think Katabasis is like that? But if it gives you those vibes, maybe it’s not for you when there are so many books to choose from. 🙂
I know this book got a lot of buzz, but I’ve yet to read any glowing reviews of it 😅 Your review has me thinking I’m making the right call on skipping this one.
Yea, it was fine, but I wasn’t blown away by it. IMHO it was overhyped.
Can’t recall if you were a fan of BABEL? I feel like that’s a hard book to follow haha.
I haven’t read BABEL yet, so KATABASIS was my first taste of Kuang’s dark academia style. I own it, though! It seems like people usually have good things to say about BABEL, so I have hope that I’ll like it more than KATABASIS.
Curiously enough, my sister (who loved BABEL) has just started KATABASIS and she is enjoying it, about 140 pages in. I think plotwise the two are quite different? So good luck with BABEL whenever you pick it up!