Katabasis by R.F. Kuang – Review

Published: August 26, 2025

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy, Dark Academia

Pages: 541 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 3 Stars

Synopsis:
Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

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 same conclusion.

---

I’ve had mixed success with R.F. Kuang’s books and Katabasis is another that lands somewhere firmly in the territory of ‘it’s fine’. Katabasis caught my attention because I am a sucker for a novel labeled as dark academia. I mean, I love the idea of secret societies, the grind of academic life, the general atmosphere of falling leaves, late nights, and looming deadlines. But honestly, I think those following characters in grad school are… just not my thing. Too serious. Undergrad is serious, but with an undercurrent of liveliness and thoughts of parties on the weekend. In Katabasis at least, grad school is pure torment. It’s easier for these characters to literally go to hell than it is for them to switch to a different thesis advisor. 

As I said, Katabasis follows Alice Law and her rival grad student, Peter Murdoch, as they journey to hell to try to save their advisor, Jacob Grimes. Grimes is a lauded magician, though he’s known throughout magical academia as a generally awful person to work for. Everyone sort of cringes when he comes up, though the prestige of having worked with him should carry anyone into a successful career. The more we learn about him and his interactions with Alice and Jacob throughout their studies, the more it becomes clear he’s an absolutely reprehensible piece of shit that totally deserved both his manner of death and his final destination in the afterlife. 

This book, in theory, should have utterly captivated me from page one. Unfortunately, I found myself struggling to stay engaged from page one. Don’t get me wrong, there were definitely some parts that really did grab my attention and that’s what ultimately propelled me towards the end – the stubborn hope that the time spent reading would be worthwhile and that the ending would be a banger. The setting of hell was interesting and I liked the idea of magicians disappearing there thanks to the hubris of their kind. I also liked the idea of Alice and Peter trying to escape a crazed family of magicians who went on purpose as part of their magic show… but yeah, that part ended up feeling like it was added simply to keep their journey toward the lowest level interesting.

Overall, Katabasis was a bit of a dud for me. I certainly didn’t hate it, but that’s no glowing recommendation and if I did recommend it, it would be with caveats. Will I read more from R.F. Kuang in the future? It would depend on the book.