By I knew I would like this book after the New Yorker described it as centering “around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died. He was a cruel mentor, yet they fear that they will never succeed on the job market without securing a letter of recommendation from him.”
That sounds like a book for me if anything does.
About the Book
Title: Katabasis
Author: R.F. Kuang
Published: 2025
Genre: fiction, fantasy, dark academia
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them–and Bret in particular–with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends–or his own mind–to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.”
My Thoughts
This was such a fun read! Katabasis follows academic rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch as they descend into Hell to rescue their unpleasant professor.
I liked that this book deviates from expectations pretty quickly. It starts out pretty whimsically, if dark (and honestly reminded me a lot of Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo ) and with the classic enemies-to-lovers setup replete with sexual tension and petty squabbles. The story is told mostly from Alice’s perspective and we get a good sense of her ambition and intensity, and why she chose to study under Professor Grimes, despite his notorious reputation–as well as why she is willing to undertake such an intense quest for the chance to keep him as a mentor after his death.
However as the characters’ odyssey through Hell progresses, more is revealed about their graduate school experience and the issues that they face: misogyny, pressure, stress, mental health, etc.
I don’t read fantasy a lot but I want to read more of it.
This was a really entertaining and fun book with an imaginative take on the afterlife. I also enjoyed the worldbuilding of Magick as a field and its basis on logical contradiction.
Kuang did drop a lot of esoteric and academic references in this book, which was both fun and also slightly annoying, but that might just be my perpetually-sensitive ego that has flared at such things ever since I was rejected from MIT and Princeton like, 4 years ago. (I always get a bit annoyed when reading dark academia because of how much the genre likes to worship prestigious schools, but whatever. I also suspect that I view R.F. Kuang with a similar envy as Alice views Peter at the beginning of the book– because how is this woman so brilliant?)
There were some aspects of the plot that struck me as confusing, convoluted or out of character (for example, Alice’s plan being not very thought-out) but overall, it was an enjoyable read.
Have you read Katabasis by R.F. Kuang? If so, what did you think of it? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!
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