R. F. KuangFantasy · Fiction·b. 1996
Katabasis
Synopsis
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.
How it reads
- Writing4.0
- Impact2.0
- Characters2.0
- Plot3.0
- Atmosphere2.0
Prose complexity 10/10
Content warnings (8)
Sexual AssaultAbuseSuicideTraumaViolenceSelf HarmTortureEating Disorder
Readers say (1)Moderate · Literary · Dark · Atmospheric · Intellectual · Dark Academia · Rivals
Readers flagged (8)
Sexual AssaultAbuseSuicideTraumaViolenceSelf HarmTortureEating Disorder
- couldn't read beyond a few pages because the although I was totally in for the plot, the writing seemed very juvenile from the beginning, like I was reading fanfic. didn't want to read something so loaded in the language of teens going through their enemies to lovers phase .
- I loved the story, the characters, and so many of the themes in this book. Kuang’s portrayal of academia, the pressure of postgraduate studies, s••••• professors, the different treatment of women, and Crohn’s disease were some of my favourite parts. BUT I also spent a lot of this book thinking “am I supposed to understand this??” 😭 There were so many references, mythological/philosophical ideas, and academic details that went completely over my head. I could tell there was so much depth to what Kuang was doing, but I often felt like I was missing something.🥲