Katabasis
by R. F. Kuang
4/5
Harper Voyager 541 pages August 26, 2025
Alice Law, a graduate student in magick at Cambridge, needs her advisor's recommendation for her career, but Professor Jacob Grimes has died in a magical accident. So she sets out to travel through Hell and bring his soul back, joined by her academic rival, Peter Murdoch.
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Jim's Review
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A descent into the underworld written as a satire of graduate school, which is a sentence only Kuang could pull off. The Hell here is built from logic puzzles, philosophy and literary allusion, and the jokes about academic ambition land as hard as the darker moments. It is dense and sometimes more interested in its ideas than its characters, so readers who want a breezy fantasy should look elsewhere. Four worms — dark academia taken all the way down.
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