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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. show more 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.

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Summary: Two graduate students studying Magick follow their deceased advisor on a journey through Hell, struggling to trust each other.

Katabasis. The word refers to a descent into the underworld, a theme in mythology from the Odyssey and Aeneid to Ovid and Dante. In fact, just about every culture has its katabasis myths. And now R. F. kuang has given us one for dark academia in a post-post-modern twenty-first century.

The story, in brief, is about two doctoral students studying Magick at Cambridge, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. Both work under Jacob Grimes, by many estimates, the greatest magician in academia. But he is not a nice man–manipulative and brutal, and many have dropped out. Murdoch and Law are determined not to, and are show more rivals. That is until an accident with a pentagram drawn by Alice rips his body apart and sends him to Hell.

The real disaster here is the loss of an advisor, which can mean starting over. Not only that, a recommendation from Grimes held the key to their futures, futures they had worked so hard to achieve. That is why they are willing to forfeit half of their life span to gain entrance to hell. Somehow, they hope to find Grimes and restore him to the upper world, at least long enough for those coveted degrees and recommendations. And the spell they use works to get them into Hell.

This novel is many things in one. Perhaps the dominant one is that it is an academic satire. Hell, as it appears to them is an academic campus. And it is one that reveals all the pretensions and petty rivalries of academia. For example, the first level, Pride, is not unlike a research library, with its inhabitants competing to compose theses that will allow them to move on, and perhaps across the River Lethe. But no one knows of any who have succeeded despite all the latest theories.

It’s also an adventure. Throughout the narrative, Alice and Peter are pursued by bony creatures energized by the Kripkes, extremely clever magicians who never made it in the academic world but were wildly successful in popular culture. Then there are others, like the Weaver Girl, who tests their loyalty to each other through posing them a Prisoner’s Dilemma challenge.

That challenge raises another aspect of the book. Kuang’s characters survive not merely by their wits and magical training. Throughout, they draw upon logic, philosophy, as well as a crash course in the mythology of the underworld. If you like intellectual puzzles, you will enjoy this.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, exposes another element–their trust in one another. Alice discovers in some of Peter’s papers that it looks like he is prepared to sacrifice Alice to retrieve Grimes. And there is a long history to their rivalry, including a compromising moment between Alice and Grimes, witnessed by Murdoch. Everything seemed to come easy for him while Alice would grind away.

Finally, while many of Hell’s inhabitants seem oblivious to their sins, the journey lays bare those of Alice. She comes face to face with the overweening ambition behind her relentless pursuit of her degree–an ambition revealed in a willingness to harm others for her own ends.

Kuang portrays a Hell without a God or paradise, only a King Yama, on which their hope of return hinges. But the irony is that in the end, survival will depend on grace of a sort.

So what did I think? Having worked in college ministry with grad students and professors, Kuang’s satire of their pretensions as well as the portrayals of the delights of the life of the mind seemed spot on. As in the Poppy Wars trilogy, Kuang is a world builder. She has added to the mythology of the geography of Hell. Most of all, she explores flawed, fallen human nature, and our blindness to our flaws. And we watch her lead character grope toward the realization that in the end, the greatest virtue is love. But we wonder if she will learn in time.
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Everyone else lived in such an ossified world. They simply took the rules given to them. They were interested only in articulating their own limits; they moved about as if in stone. But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall once again.


Setting & Plot : In a 1980s alternate universe, magick is real and studied in schools. A fading discipline as far as breakthroughs, it is still competitive for those studying, graduating, and going into positions. Alice Law and her rival Peter Murdoch are graduate students at Cambridge who decide to venture into the Underworld show more to bring their advisor’s soul back. Because, as one of the greatest magicians of modern times, Professor Jacob Grimes’ standing will make all the difference in a recommendation and future success.

But it wasn’t just the search for answers, either, or the simple satisfaction of a puzzle solved. It was a primitive thrill, a heady realization of what she could become, what worlds she could unlock, and it was all inextricably bound up in him.

Peter Murdoch and his bird’s-nest hair, scarecrow limbs balanced atop a rickety bicycle, looked like he’d never tried at anything in his life. He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain.


Characterizations : Alice and Peter read as real and flawed people, their motivations made clear and their reasoning understandable if not commendable. They still manage to be sympathetic despite failings of personality / mentality / integrity, because in the end, each has the capacity for remorse and the ability to atone. Their relationship is complex and fluid, flowing this way and that until the whole picture comes together of who they are and what they really mean to each other.

“We only need to get down,” she told Peter. For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.


The Format : The book starts right as Alice and Peter leave for the Underworld. As the story goes on, we learn about them through the recalling of their past, we see more and more how Grimes deeply affected them, and we’re given revelations into their motivations for going to save him. Interwoven throughout are chapters explaining the world and magic system, and how each thing relates to the plot. To some readers these chapters were meandering, held down the sense of urgency of the unfolding story, and brought it to a halt. I enjoyed the format, and honestly, if I'm not given proper understanding of the world, who characters are, why they are that way, and how they’re doing what they’re doing, then it's harder for me to care *what* they’re doing.

It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants, and they devastated you by being so human. This was the saddest thing. The loss of faith.


Themes / Subject Matter : There’s so much here. Academia is at the core, so specifically there’s the pressures and costs of competitive higher education, the relationships between students who are in it together yet rivals for position and standing, and the failure of and abuse by callous teachers who are supposed to be guiding and supporting students. These act a springboard for things like identity, drive, self-destruction, death, love, (external & internalized) misogyny, personal agency, etc.

“Hell gets so lonely. I enjoy companions.” Great white skeins of fabric emerged from her back and hung poised behind her. A spider’s web. If she squinted, Alice could see human remnants in that web; the detritus of centuries of lovers leeched from and discarded. Some of those victims had been alive once. Sojourners. Shades did not leave bones.


Prose : Kuang's narrative voice was funny, evocative, poetic, informative, ironic, bitter, cutting, disturbing, guilty, hopeful—it was everything. The many references to philosophy, mathematics, literature, mythology etc. didn't bother me—this is a story about academia so I found they added flavor and context. The chapter-specific info dumps didn't bother me—being organized this way made it easier to focus in chapters where the plot unfolded.

The entirety of the past rose vivid in her mind’s eye, a thousand television screens playing all at once, and none of them told her the truth, all they gave were snapshots, a useless deluge of detail. An empty glass of beer, an empty chair. The Pick, quiet before closing, and a bitter taste in her mouth. Belinda’s airy sighs. Have you met Peter Murdoch? The shape of him; the length of his lashes; chalk on her fingertips, chalk on his shirt. Look outside, said Professor Grimes; you see that kid? Darjeeling tea, brewed too long, tasting like acid. Dry scones like cement in her throat. She could not swallow it down. Grimes at a blackboard, Grimes at a chessboard. Fortune favors the bold, magick rewards the decisive. The first mover wins; the losers play catch-up. Are you a born loser? Do you have the guts?


This book was basically perfect to me. Everything came together in a way that was engaging, compelling, heartbreaking, and culminated in an ending that was thematically / appropriately bittersweet, but was all the more sweet for the bitterness. It's not just a favorite of the year for me, but of all time.
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This book had so much potential! Everything I could ask for -- a magic system based on formal logic, descent into mythological hell, creative justification for the use of chalk in drawing pentagrams... the first few chapters had me very excited.

Unfortunately, it wasn't only the characters that experienced a descent into hell -- everything got worse from there. The pacing felt pretty inconsistent, there's lots of time spent on early relationship anxiety, and a number of times where an impossible situation was solved by a random stroke of fate. I won't say much about the ending other than it felt cliched and not worth the effort to finish.

The cool magic system didn't end up getting used to the degree that I had hoped either. The show more paradox-based spells are kind of all one-off paradox name dropping, rather than really feeling integrated into the story, or having much continuity. Feels like there was a lot of unexplored potential here, especially given the author's willingness to explain everything.

The book's concept of hell is ..really.. cerebral, there's not much in the way of horror at all. This kind of makes sense in context but might not be what people are expecting going in.

Katabasis basically ends up being a long love/hate rant about higher academia that felt a bit raw, like reading someone's diary. The characters seem to provide an avenue to explore some strange ideas around work ethic, women in academia, abuse of power, etc.

I wish I could read another book in this universe with a less self referential plot. Like, have things that actually happen, and the characters just happen to be "analytical magicians".
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Alice Law is a driven, highly competitive PhD. candidate. Unfortunately, her advisor, Dr. Jacob Grimes has unexpectedly died and this might have negative repercussions on Alice’s finalizing of her thesis and professional status. So Alice has decided that she is going to go down into hell and bring her advisor back from the dead. Based on her studies, this will likely involve visiting each of Dante’s eight courts. She isn’t sure whether she’ll find Grimes in Pride, Desire, or Greed, but she has no intention of failing in this particular quest. As it happens, despite her own preference and careful planning, at the last minute she is accompanied by a second Grimes advisee, Peter Murdoch. Making one’s way through Hell is not show more simple and the two have many adventures before the novel’s end.

There are plenty of allusions in Katabasis. Having gotten through Katabasis once, my immediate reaction is to sit down and go through it again. Just as Gaiman’s American Gods challenged the reader to recognize references to folklore and mythology, so Kuang’s book challenges us to consider ideas and their nuances regarding Death and Judgement. There are many considerations. As noted in the text: “if you’re guilty of wrath, do you necessarily need to be punished for pride? Does greed entail desire? Is it all a nesting doll of wrongdoing, or can you skip over some…” Kuang touches on a multitude of cultural and theological assumptions about the afterlife.

In my view this is the primary reason behind her writing Katabasis. While the world-building here is solid, Kuang wants her protagonists to wrestle with the Big Questions the way that serious scholars do. (Back in time, the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin was in fact a serious point of contention. Only in the modern world, do we see it as a meaningless concern.) Kuang essentially enters into a conversation with Dante, with Virgil, with T.S. Eliot and others about the experience of Hell.

There are parts of Katabasis that are bleak. Hell can be a desert; it can be an Escher staircase. Other parts are humorous. There were one or two segments that I found horrific. By book’s end, she has taken the reader on a very thorough tour of Hell.

The marketing pitch for this book was mixed. At the highest level, the market viewed it as being fantasy because, after all, who actually believes in Hell?There were hints that it was a romance, a love story where opposites attract. It was described as dark academe and certainly, Kuang has no love for the traditional process followed in gaining a PhD. While each of those descriptions has validity, Katabasis is not froth. One can read it that way, but you’ll be missing a lot of Kuang’s intent if you settle for that.
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When Alice Law and Peter Murdoch's doctoral supervisor is killed by a spell, the two postgraduates feel they have no choice but to go to Hell to retrieve his soul so they can finish their degrees. As two students of analytic magic, getting to Hell is the easy part. Once there they'll discover that the greatest trials in Hell may not be the various courts but ones of their own making.

Kuang is a brilliant writer and she shines so brightly here. While the novel starts in a place of "academia is Hell," which is already an excellent premise, she then dives into a character study that touches on mental health and depression, the power of memory, our inability to truly understand another person, and ultimately what makes a person want to keep show more living. And yet while delving into these themes she also writes a compelling plot and creates a fascinating world in Hell that is influenced by multiple cultural visions of the underworld. An emotionally demanding read, it was one I ultimately found rewarding. Recommended for those who are in or have survived university (particularly graduate and postgraduate programs) and/or those who have always been fascinated by tales of the underworld whether in ancient myths, Dante, or elsewhere. show less
Katabasis — from the ancient Greek for "descent into the underworld" — is set in 1980s Cambridge, in a world where analytic magick is an elite, punishing academic discipline, spells drawn with chalk pentagrams and powered by logical paradoxes. Alice Law has sacrificed everything — her health, her relationships, her sanity — for one goal: to be one of the greatest magicians of her generation, working under Professor Jacob Grimes, the most influential analytick magician in England. Then a magical accident in the lab that may be Alice's fault kills Grimes, sending his soul to Hell. With his letters of recommendation still in his now-incorporeal hands and her entire future on the line, Alice draws her pentagram, strikes a brutal show more bargain — half her remaining life for passage — and descends.
She is immediately joined, uninvited, by Peter Murdoch: smug, brilliant, infuriating, her fiercest academic rival, who has his own private reasons for wanting Grimes back. Hell is structured into eight Courts — Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny, and a mysterious Eighth — and each one mirrors the moral universe they came from. Pride is a chilly library demanding scholars define The Good in an exam that never ends. Desire is a student center. Alongside bone-creature monsters, a terrifying faction called the Kripkes who can annihilate even the spirits of the dead, and an unexpected ally in Elspeth — a long-dead grad student now ferrying souls across the River Lethe — there is also a cat named Archimedes. The novel Kuang considers a dark academic duology with Babel. Debuted #1 in the US, UK, Canada simultaneously. Amazon MGM television adaptation already in development.

[May contain spoilers]
The revelations about Alice and Peter's pasts in the second half are where the novel truly ignites — both characters are deeply, genuinely flawed in ways that reframe the entire quest. Grimes himself is not the great man Alice believed him to be — the mentor worship the novel has been quietly dismantling throughout the descent culminates in a reckoning with what Alice has actually been chasing and what it has cost her. The ending is cathartic rather than triumphant — Grimes is essentially damned by his own choices while Alice and Peter choose each other and life over prestige. Peter is based on Kuang's own husband.
What I think: This is ambitious, dense, and fiercely intelligent dark academia fantasy — the first half is a deliberate slog for some readers due to heavy philosophical exposition, but the second half pays off hard.
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This is mythological dark academia on an epic scale. It pulls from all kinds of myths and legends about descent into hell, the domains you travel through, the puzzles and bargains required to claw your way back. I first fell in love with Babel, then felt thrown off by the lit-fic turn in Yellowface, so I was excited to get back to Kuang’s writing in this domain. So much of this story hit too close to home. I’m nearly five years out from my PhD, and honestly, some parts didn’t feel like fantastical exaggeration at all. I savoured this book, I cried for Alice and Peter, for the guilt and dashed dreams, the moments of hope and relief, and everything in between. We’ve all lived through our own little hells, and it meant something to show more see that reflected on the page. Also, turns out molecular biology and magick aren’t so different after all. My biggest complaint is predictable: it dragged. At over 500 pages, of course it felt epic, but it also felt padded in places. I braced myself to hate Alice, having seen early complaints about how insufferable it was to live in her head. But I couldn’t. I didn’t love her either, but so much of what made her frustrating lives in me too, the desperation to succeed paired with the fear of not being good enough, that swing between drive and despair. I basically cried through the last 30 pages for every possible reason. I’d recommend this book widely, though maybe not to anyone currently slogging through a PhD. Save it for after your defense. show less

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Author Information

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13+ Works 34,200 Members

Some Editions

Aquan, Richard L. (Cover designer)
Arrasmith, Patrick (Illustrator)
Arrasmith, Patrick (Cover artist)
Franck, Heide (Translator)
Jordan, Alexandra (Translator)
Sims, Morag (Narrator)
Vargas, Marina (Translator)
Watt, Will (Narrator)

Awards and Honors

Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Katabasis
Original title
Katabasis
Original publication date
2025-08-26
People/Characters
Alice Law; Professor Jacob Grimes; Peter Murdoch
Important places
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK; Hell; Limbo
Dedication
To Bennett, brilliant, beloved
First words
Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pe... (show all)e breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor's soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.
Blurbers
Bardugo, Leigh; Ross, Rebecca; Blake, Olivie; Patel, Vaishnavi; Brown, Gareth; Chakraborty, Shannon (show all 7); Roanhorse, Rebecca

Classifications

Genres
Fantasy, Fiction and Literature, Romance, General Fiction
DDC/MDS
813.6Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English2000-
LCC
PS3611 .U17 .K38Language and LiteratureAmerican literature
BISAC

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