Katabasis

Alice Law has given everything to become the best student of analytic magick at Cambridge, until her brilliant, monstrous advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, dies in a spell gone wrong, taking her academic future down with him. Worse, she suspects the accident may have been her fault. So Alice does the only thing she can think of: she descends into Hell to retrieve his soul. She isn't alone. Peter Murdoch, her charming, infuriating rival for Grimes's favor, has had the same idea, and the two reluctantly journey together through an underworld organized as a grotesque parody of academic life. In this version of Hell, magick runs on logical paradoxes drawn in chalk, and the dead are sorted through courts that mirror theses, defenses, and faculty politics. Blending Chinese mythology with Dante and the Greek myths of descent, this dark academia fantasy follows two ambitious, exhausted scholars bargaining with damnation for a letter of recommendation. A standalone novel and a thematic companion to Babel, it skewers the cruelties of the university while sending its rivals deeper into danger, and closer to each other.