Hell is other postgrads: On RF Kuang’s Katabasis

Academic giant RF Kuang makes a comeback with a scholarly perspective on hell, magick and the philosophy surrounding its logistics. Katabasis, one of 2025's most anticipated books, debuted on the shelves late August and readers have mixed reviews on it. 

The story is about two post-grad students, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, journeying into hell to retrieve their professor's soul after his untimely death. The reason? His ironclad recommendation letters. The magick industry is a tough nut to crack and Prof Jacob Grimes is at the top of the food chain for those looking for jobs in the field. 

The book is a sardonic and academic, modern-day, amalgamation of Orpheus' tale, Dante's Inferno and another countless amount of literary works in which a character goes to hell and back. However, somewhere between the story's initial objective and the route it ends up taking by the end, the book manages to fall short of the expectations placed upon it. 

The story is mainly told from the perspective of Alice Law, an American student who came to Cambridge to study under the best of the best, to surround herself with it, to become it. Against the advice of her counsellor, she chooses Professor Grimes, infamous throughout the department as a tyrant-genius, as her advisor. 

Her plan is to assist him in the labs with menial work such as drawing pentagrams and double-checking spells and incantations, and steadily build up to the more significant work, like co-authoring papers and discovering anomalies. 

This plan is foiled by the existence of his other, better student, enter: Peter Murdoch. A man prone to excellence and superiority, someone who's so good at his work, people simply overlook his flaky tendencies. He's fawned over, revered, and chosen over Alice every time, even though they do the same work. So when the time comes to drop down into hell and Peter shows up and pops into Alice's chalk pentagram, she surrenders her hopes that this will be an easy trip. 

Though the premise itself is promising, especially with such an academic approach to what is often thought of as just eternal suffering and hellfire, Katabasis seems to forget the story it was telling halfway through the book. In between the narration of their journey, we get flashes of introspection into Alice's character, her past, and her relationship with her fellow sojourner, Peter. 

These glimpses into Alice's psyche are at times razor-sharp and compelling, offering readers a portrait of a woman caught between ambition and insecurity, yet at other moments they overstay their welcome, tipping into indulgence. 

Kuang clearly intends to balance the literal journey downward with the metaphorical one inward, but the effect is uneven: where Dante's descent mapped moral order, Alice's feels at points like a seminar paper left half-edited.

What becomes striking as the novel unfolds is the imbalance in characterisation between the two. Alice is an amalgamation of her encounters and experiences in life. Her insecurities, ambitions, and grudges are rendered with such clarity that even her contradictions feel intentional. Peter, by contrast, exists more as an idea than a person: the golden boy, the untouchable rival, the perfect foil against whom Alice's frustrations sharpen. 

While this dynamic mirrors Alice's tunnel vision, the effect on the reader is that Peter feels hollow, a silhouette sketched to highlight her own struggles rather than a figure with real weight. In a book so concerned with rivalry and partnership, this disparity leaves the relationship at its core oddly lopsided.

Stylistically, Kuang retains her signature precision. The footnotes, citations, and wry academic asides add texture, and there are passages of dazzling erudition where the novel feels like a genuine treatise on demonology and the bureaucracy of the underworld. The immersion into a dystopic, dark academic piece of literature is something Kuang can always be trusted to hit right on the head. 

However, these moments of brilliance only serve to highlight the tonal dissonance when the narrative slows or strays. Readers looking for a tightly wrought dark fantasy may feel cheated; those hungry for a meta-fictional lecture on the mechanics of hell will revel.

By its close, Katabasis delivers a conclusion that is more an ambiguous shrug than a grand revelation. It gestures toward the futility of ambition, the corrosive nature of rivalry, and the thin line between devotion and self-destruction, yet the impact is blunted by the detours taken along the way. One puts the book down not so much shaken as academically impressed, admiring the scaffolding more than the structure itself.

Ultimately, Kuang has written a novel that is as much about the study of hell as it is about inhabiting it. Whether that is enough depends on the reader's appetite: for some, Katabasis will feel like a bold, genre-defying descent worth making; for others, it will feel like being trapped in office hours that run just a little too long.