Review of Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

I loved the dark--and often darkly funny--journey of Cambridge postgraduate magick students Alice and Peter to hell, a quest they undertake because their advisor has died and they really need his recommendations. Also, they each fear they're the one who killed him.

...maybe going on meant believing in what she couldn't possibly know. Maybe if she went on she could find some way to make this pain stop.

In Kuang's dark academia fantasy novel Katabasis, Alice Law is a postgraduate student in a ruthlessly competitive analytic magick program at Cambridge. She is intrigued by and also deeply irritated by her academic rival, Peter Murdoch, who seems to be showing her up at every turn in their relentless slog of blood, sweat, and tears. Luckily, recommendations from their selfish, brilliant advisor, Professor Grimes, should set them up for successful careers.

But Grimes dies a grisly death while trying to enter the underworld, and Alice and Peter are separately, secretly convinced that they are each the one who killed him.

What else is there to do but journey to hell together to try to get him back--and preserve their precious recommendations?

Katabasis (a hero's journey to the underworld and back to the land of the living) is a 559-page saga, with repeated references to Dante's Inferno and its circles of hell as Alice and Peter journey through their own eight courts of hell, trying to locate and save Grimes. Some of these circles are somewhat glossed over--and the pacing flagged at times for me as the protagonists passed through court after court--but the eerie, sinister feeling and deadly danger are ever present.

The heart of the story is the hesitant, guarded, fraught dynamic between Alice and Peter and their halting vulnerability and growing trust. They revisit past missteps, moral gray areas and regrets, their previously singular focus upon "the work," their mutual deifying of their advisor, and the constant subsuming of their own desires. In hell, tragedy and destruction lie around each bend, and their imminent deaths bring pinpoint focus and clarity to their lives and to Peter and Alice's feelings about each other.

Peter, it turns out, struggles greatly with Crohn's disease, and Alice struggles with mental health issues around depression, perfection, and trauma. They have each given up some of their values and what feel like parts of their souls in order to give Grimes what he asked for, and while in hell, the two students begin to recognize and resent the exceedingly great sacrifices they've made.

This is a clever, strange, dark, and often darkly funny fantasy. The pacing flagged for me throughout the middle of the story, during the slog through various avenues of hell, and the worldbuilding felt slim and glossed over during some of the many courts of hell.

I often felt on the outside of an English class whose texts I hadn't examined in decades, with the novel's many references to Dante's Inferno, Eliot's "The Waste Land," and other literary works. I rolled with these without really feeling able to track them as the basis for much of the logic and structure Kuang establishes for her version of hell, as there seemed no hope that I was going to assess these layered and everchanging foundations in a casual reading. I was, ultimately, here for the character development and redemption, which Kuang provides in satisfying fashion.

The bendable, undefined rules of hell (which I didn't understand and which kept being sprung upon the reader) turned out to be quite convenient, and after Peter's disappearance, Alice shines as the sole problem solver, capable of sacrifice and dealmaking.

More from this Author

R. F. Kuang is also the author of Yellowface, The Poppy War, Babel, The Burning God, and The Dragon Republic.

Another book that involves an attempted escape from hell is Leigh Bardugo's Hell Bent.