asianamlitfans | A Review of R.K. Kuang’s Katabasis (Harper Voyager, 2025).

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

The next book I wanted to review is Katabasis by RF Kuang. I have read all of Kuang’s other works (the Poppy War Trilogy, Yellowface, and Babel, still my favorite). I was really excited about this book just because of the premise of this book: “Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams…. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion. With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like. But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.” I found this novel really engaging on the plot level and somewhat maybe more comic than she intended, just because I mean, she may have intended it to be incredibly comedic, but this is another dark academy type novel like Babel. This novel has a lot of resonances with a series I recently read, called the Atlas Six. It was one of those series that I found really hard to get through because I didn’t like many of the characters. But, in Kuang’s novel, there were a lot of emotional grounding points for me. I’ve had my fair share of hellish moments in academia, so it feels apropos that this text would move doctoral characters to hell, and there is kind of this allegorical or maybe not so allegorical way of thinking about the academy as hell on earth or a version of hell. I think it was a challenging aspect for Kuang in terms of envisioning what hell was, and I don’t know if it was really that hellish to me at first, and I certainly had darker conceptions of what it could be like. It becomes apparent that the “hell” of the novel is really more an underworld, and some people will eventually leave hell because they choose to drink from the river to be reincarnated, so that’s the version of the way that the afterlife works in this fictional world. But if you stay in hell, you’re typically confined to one of the eight realms: there’s a desire, greed, or what have you. So where the sort of more dark components of this novel take shape are the individuals who are staying in hell for one reason or another, and they (Alice and Peter) do meet this former student from Cambridge who gets them out of a really bad situation, and you feel as though they finally made a kind of ally, but then they sort of throw her under the bus in order to achieve their own ends. In addition, Alice doesn’t fully trust Peter, even though it becomes really apparent that both of them have a strange sort of rivalry/connection with each other. On that level, I think Kuang does really well because I mean, at least I bought into their connection that it was both one that was antagonistic, but also one in which they are drawn to each other. This latter element was really important because if you didn’t believe that, then you wouldn’t want to keep reading this novel, because it’s what really holds the emotional core in the first half. I don’t want to spoil the back half, but some terrible stuff happens, and Alice has to end up going through part of hell on her own in order to achieve her final goal, which is to try to get Jacob Grimes out of hell. Where the novel sort of loses me at one point, and which I wasn’t entirely certain I would come back from, is based upon what happens in the final arc. We start getting more information about Jacob Grimes as a character, and he’s already quite questionable and is somebody who is a professor on the tenure track. I didn’t fully understand why Alice would want to even bother endangering her own life or anyone else’s to go down there for any reason, good or bad, given this guy and how scummy he has been. But Kuang does have some tricks up her sleeve in terms of that potting, and so I felt really satisfied at the end. I think the only thing about the conclusion that I still look back on, in which you still have to have some level of disbelief, is just why anyone would go to the trouble of that much peril just to go down into hell for someone that they already knew that they didn’t like. Despite this critique, the book is immensely readable and certainly one that will function as dark comedy for those of us who have already been to the underworld called academia.

Buy the Book Here.