Hell is a campus. Or at least, the lower circles are, as Cambridge student Alice Law discovers when she makes the decision to journey into the underworld to retrieve the soul of her academic adviser after an unfortunate accident, and finds it a mirror of the world she descended from. Appropriately, acclaimed fantasy author R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is named for the ancient Greek term for a journey into the underworld. Her dark academia fantasy interrogates themes of loss, grief, and human nature in its refracted version of Cambridge University where Analytical Magick is a field that allows those able to master mathematics, logic, linguistics, and philosophy to bend the rules of reality.
Alice Law's dream has been to dominate that field; the only person who could stand in her way is Peter Murdoch, her adviser's other graduate student. They have been pitted against each other from the beginning as the two potentially brightest students of their cohort, so when he tags along at the last moment as she prepares for her descent into Hell, she does not know what to think. But while they both are at the top of their class, bright, full of promise, and exceptionally well trained, nothing could have prepared them for the reality of the shifting landscape where they now are reliant on each other to survive. Hell is both crueler and kinder than they could have expected, and navigating the terrain that no chart or sojourner's account has ever fully managed to map forces them to pull out their darkest secrets and lay them bare before each other. Their journey pushes them further than they could have anticipated and teaches them more than they could have imagined about life itself. They learn what it might mean not only to choose a life that is about more than surviving, but also to find one's true friends in an environment that celebrates solitude and an imitation of asceticism as a marker of one's potential for success.
Kuang's hellscape is dark, gory, and brutal, but more ruthless is the mirror she holds up to institutional norms and structures that will feel all too familiar to those in the know. As Kuang (Yellowface; Babel) reveals abusive relationships and the glorification of poverty wages and overwork, she does not hold back from depicting a reality that is sometimes even more horrifying than the carnage of Hell itself. With enthralling prose that makes it impossible to put down, Katabasis is a timeless fantasy that explores what it might mean to travel through death to discover the meaning of life. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: R.F. Kuang's dark academia fantasy epic takes readers to Hell and back in an unforgettable journey.