katabasis (book)

rating

starstarstarstar_halfstar

date

30 november 2025

genre

fantasy

author

rebecca f. kuang

tldr: grad students will go to to hell instead of just going to therapy.

katabasis is the newest novel by rebecca f. kuang, who's known for combining her own academia experience (just casually pursuing a phd while churning out a book per year) with dark alt-history fantasy, often politically charged. the political themes take a backseat here, while the academia experience on a more personal level is the focus.

the book is set in the 1980s of a world that is close to ours with the big exception of the existence of magick, invoked by drawing pentagrams and powered by logical fallacies and paradoxes. we follow cambridge grad student alice law, who studies just that field under brilliant but casually cruel professor jacob grimes, who she, prior to the start of the plot, accidentally killed, by preparing a faulty pentagram for him. to get back her thesis advisor (and driven by the guilt, too, i guess) and rescue her academic career, as any sane person would, alice comes up with the plan to enter hell and attempt to make a trade with the king of the underworld (most often refered to as buddhist yama here, but different religious and cultural counterparts are affirmed to be the same deity under a different name throughout the book). so, not only is magick a thing, hell is real and classic literature and scripture on the topic is seen as factual research to a certain degree (i never read dante's inferno, but it's the one invoked most often).

begrudgingly, alice is accompanied by her fellow student slash rival slash crush peter murdoch and together they make their way through the circles of hell, coming across deceased people traveling through the afterlife to hopefully get reincarnated, mysterious adversaries and a cat that freely hops through the planes of existence.

compared to kuang's babel, which i thought had fairly thin and undeveloped characters despite enjoying the plot a lot, katabasis mostly is about alice's characterization and her grappling with the hold professor grimes has on her despite an obviously abusive working and personal relationship. essentially, alice needs an entire journey through all the circles of hell to understand that her self-worth is not tethered to a guy who can make or break people's careers on a whim and who knowingly uses and abuses this power to have his subordinates fall in line and exploit them. it's a slow and frustrating process, but in my opinion a very well-executed one and the best part of the book. it also explores the abuses of power and gender discrimination in academia more generally (the former more successfully than the latter) through the lens of this personal relationship.

the system of magick, as it is described here, is once again, like babel's inventive system of linguistics-fueled magic silver bars, really interesting and fun. linguistics also play a role here, but mostly it's powered by logical paradoxes, which is neat and the aesthetics of academic researchers drawing up pentagrams and chanting incantations to do science is great.

the journey through hell itself i'm a bit more ambivalent about, as everything here is also cambridge and academia-themed, all the denizens of hell ("shades") seem to be academics, too and their path to reincarnation is literally through writing a thesis, which obviously is to a) compare academia to hell, which seemed to be the actual genesis of the novel and b) to have some more thematic coherence, but it made me wonder: is this a special hell for academics or are only academics worthy of being sent to hell? the characterization of hell as a combination of desolate wasteland and university campus just didn't fully work for me.

pacing-wise it also felt uneven to me at times, at certain times it plodded on a bit and some scenes probably could have been cut outright and the book would've lost nothing except for some semi-clever academia satire. there's a romance subplot here that is pleasant enough and helped in bringing the book to a neat, hopeful conclusion but i wasn't too wild about it either.

overall, i had a good time with it, even though i had to power through certain sections. sticks the landing well after almost losing its focus a few times.