Whether you say KAH-tuh-BA-sis or kuh-TA-buh-sis, the meaning’s the same: a journey downward, which is exactly where this book drags its readers.
Released on 26 August 2025, R.F. Kuang’s “Katabasis” arrived with heavy anticipation and immediate debate. Kuang’s books have always sparked strong reactions. Some readers admire her ability to weave dense ideas into fiction, while others find her style too close to academic writing to feel immersive. But the polarized response reflects what has followed her career from the start: a writer whose work is ambitious, divisive, and impossible to ignore.
“Katabasis” blends fantasy, romance, dark academia, and gothic elements. At its center are Alice Law, an ambitious but fragile graduate student, and Peter Murdoch, her academic rival. The two descend into a Hell modeled on Cambridge University to retrieve their recently deceased advisor, Professor Grimes, whose recommendation letter is Alice’s only hope of advancing in her field. The premise is absurd in the best way, and Kuang uses it to examine how far people will go to chase prestige. At 559 pages, the book allows space for both underworld trials and the complicated inner lives of its characters, with romance kept firmly in the background.
Alice is what you’d call an “academic weapon,” but she’s slowly falling apart inside. Kuang explores her internalized misogyny, depression, and chronic illness with unflinching detail, allowing readers to understand her contradictions without excusing them. Peter, meanwhile, is equally sharp, but deliberately kept at a distance, his complexity slowly revealed through Alice’s perspective. Their dynamic shifts from rivalry to something more intimate, but the story avoids turning into a conventional romance.
Kuang herself is no stranger to writing about ambition, institutions, and power. Across “The Poppy War,” “Babel,” and “Yellowface,” she has used different genres to critique systems that shape and destroy lives–whether militarism, colonial academia, or the publishing industry. “Katabasis” continues that trajectory, turning her focus to the prestige-obsessed world of higher-education. Like her earlier novels, it pairs meticulous research with a sharp eye for how people bend under the weight of institutions.
The world of “Katabasis” reflects that approach. Hell is portrayed as a fun-house mirror of Cambridge, complete with courts, the city of Dis, and trial spaces that feel bureaucratic and ironic. Magic here does not involve spells or wands but chalk diagrams, logical paradoxes, and puzzles that open or close pathways. The result is a world that feels both eerie and absurd, grounding the descent in the same intellectual games that dominate the characters’ lives.
The book’s themes are direct and effective. Kuang critiques prestige culture and the costs of ambition, explores mental health without reducing it to a symbol, and portrays the messier parts of being a woman in male-doimnated fields. She pushes readers to consider what makes life meaningful when accolades and institutional approval are stripped away.
The title points to its inspirations. A “katabasis” is a descent into the underworld, a motif found in Dante’s Inferno, where the poet travels through nine circles of Hell, and in the story of Orpheus, who attempts to rescue Eurydice. Kuang draws on these traditions without requiring readers to study them first, using the references as texture.
For me, “Katabasis” succeeds more often than it falters. Alice’s interiority feels sharp and humane, the logic-based magic fits Kuang’s academic critique, and the novel ends on a satisfying reflection about what makes life worth living. I did feel weighed down in the early chapters, where the narration reads like a conference paper, and I thought some of the underworld challenges resolved too easily. Still, the overall arc paid off. I would give “Katabasis” 4 out of 5 stars: one for its premise and satire of academia, one for Alice’s mental health arc and the messy portrayal of her portrayal, one for the originality of the chalk-logic system and the well-placed twists, and one for sticking the landing on its “meaning of life” conclusion. The flaws are real, but the descent is worth taking.
