Review

It’s the 1980s, and Alice Law is an Asian-American PhD student in Analytic Magick at Cambridge University, whose famously difficult supervisor, Professor Grimes, has just been spectacularly blown up by one of his experiments. And it’s all Alice’s fault: she was the exhausted drudge who chalked the faulty pentagram… not that anyone else knows that. But Alice needs to bring him back. Vile as he is, he’s the only one who can write the recommendations she needs to get the job in academia she so desperately wants.

So she’s going to Hell. Unfortunately, so is her academic rival and fellow PhD student, the carelessly brilliant Peter Murdoch. Together, they traverse the courts of hell, armed with perpetual flasks, lembas bread and chalk. And as they negotiate this eerily campus-like hellscape, they learn some difficult lessons about academia, power, rivalry, misogyny, and themselves.

*

This was far more fun than I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to read it as soon as I heard about it, but I thought it might be a tad difficult. Not really. It’s more of a fantasy romp that has lots of intertextuality in it. Some pages are a bit tough, and I won’t pretend to understand all the logic puzzles. But at its heart it’s dark academia satire, a quest, and a love story: all entertaining things. (The strapline is “To hell with love”, which is enjoyable in itself, not to mention ambiguous.) The appalling abuse of power, probably its main theme, might well put you off an academic career for life. R. F. Kuang, by the way, is a PhD candidate at Yale, who’s also studied at Oxford and Cambridge (Wikipedia). She knows what she’s talking about.

Katabasis means “a descent into the underworld” and obviously Dante comes in for lots of mentions, as both scholars have scoured the literary and academic sources for information prior to their trip to Hell. Alice’s name is also significant: she’s exploring like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in her underground Wonderland. Carroll, as an academic specialising in mathematical logic, comes in for quite a few mentions too, and I thought sometimes the prose seemed a bit Alice-y (in a good way, of course!), especially when shades (spirits) are arguing with each other in ludicrously academic ways.

The narrative unfolds in third person, mostly from Alice’s perspective, but at one point later in the book, through Peter’s perspective. I became very invested in Alice and was desperately hoping everything would turn out okay for her (not going to reveal if it does or not). I can really see this being made into a film or a limited series.

Kuang has lots to satirise here and although it’s often amusing, there are also a lot of darker themes and moments. At 541 pages, it will probably only be of interest to keen readers year 10+. One for your cleverest fantasy fans.

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Alice experiences academic misogyny and sexual harassment by Professor Grimes & the institution in general; suicidal ideation by Alice; it’s later revealed that Peter has a secret chronic illness; unethical abuses of power by Grimes towards both Peter and Alice; fantasy violence – a bit gory, but not overly so; mentions of suicide by minor characters; a child dies (backstory – killed by own parents); at least one animal dies on the page. A very vaguely described sex scene – brief, no detail. A few occasional swears: f-word, s-word… might have been some others?

*

Kuang, R. F. (2025). Katabasis. HarperVoyager.

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