“To hell with love”? To hell with this book.
Katabasis (2025), R.F. Kuang’s newest fantasy novel set in the fictitious Magick Department of Cambridge University in the 1980s, follows Analytical Magick PhD hopeful Alice Law as she, on the verge of — or amidst — a breakdown, tries to go to Hell to resurrect her recently, gorily deceased advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes. This “genius” yet terrible advisor was accidentally slaughtered during an experiment they were conducting together. But as she draws her portal to Hell, Peter Murdoch, her laissez-faire but exceptionally talented academic rival and, obviously, Alice’s mystifying love interest, crashes her trip.
As a big R.F. Kuang fan, I had very high hopes for this book and found that I was left disappointed. What I usually love about Kuang’s work is that she does a masterful job at constructing narratives that force readers to truly contemplate the moral grey that perhaps does not have one fully “correct” answer. Another novel of hers, Babel, asked if there can be any form of revolt against injustice for the better without violence, and if there must be violence, what is the acceptable amount? These are questions that may never have one perfect answer.
Despite the fact that Katabasis literally takes place in Hell, perhaps no better setting for contemplating tough moral quandaries, there is nothing ethically challenging about this book. When all of Professor Grimes’ horrors are revealed, including mentally tormenting Alice, conducting magical experiments on her, sexually assaulting her, and torpedoing her academic career, a reader’s natural response is… well, I’m glad he’s dead. Please don’t bring him back. Kuang brings no moral tension to the issue, even as who is truly culpable for Grimes’ death is brought to light, because he so clearly deserved to die.
One of the book’s other main flaws is the characters. Most of the characters fail to leave a particularly lasting impression, almost as though they were shades! But readers will remember Alice, only for all the wrong reasons. I am all for a complicated, imperfect female character, but Alice is incredibly hateable — seemingly unintentionally. She is arrogant and mean while also deeply insecure, a genuinely bad person (sic: her betrayal of Elspeth), and generally uninteresting.
Kuang tries to lean into the tension of Alice being a woman in an intensely patriarchal, masculine field in the ‘80s, and the varied, complicated responses women can have to that kind of environment. Sometimes women lean into feminism, sometimes they try to neutralize gender altogether, sometimes they embrace the male rhetoric and learn to hate other women. This is an interesting and valuable challenge which women still face today. But in Katabasis it just doesn’t play. The issue is that the readers have no sympathy for Alice. She chases the most punishing professor, renowned for his poor treatment of students, particularly beautiful young women who fit Alice’s aesthetic profile, sending them into breakdowns or suicide, because she wants to prove that they were weak, that she is better than these other female strangers.
It doesn’t even feel like she’s the product of her environment, because she is warned time and again against working with Grimes, and is given kind, personalized guidance during undergrad at Cornell that makes it seem like she was valued in spite of her gender. Other women even try to mentor her and she scorns them. The driving factor of Alice’s suffering is her own insufferable pride, so readers don’t feel bad for her when the consequences come back to bite her. Kuang almost tries to backtrack and insert some gendered experience with a flashback at the end of the novel through Magnolia Kripke, who was a very powerful female magician who was also a wife and mother, but it comes far too late to have an impact, especially because it doesn’t seem like a revelation in the moment for Alice — it was a revelation she had ten years ago that she just hasn’t shared until now.
This brings us to pacing and structure, the other issues in Katabasis. Both Alice’s trauma and Peter’s — Crohn’s disease — seem both sanitized and overblown, so that you think, Really? This is what has made them so insufferable? Grow up! Kuang reveals these substanceless formative experiences very late in the book, seemingly waiting as long as possible to build anticipation to compensate for their lack of real surprise or interesting, unique subject matter. This is particularly irritating because I was locked in for the first 200 pages of this book in excitement of getting to the good stuff only to realize the good stuff may never actually be coming but being too far into Hell to turn back, just like the characters.
To that end, this book is hell, literally and figuratively. Kuang’s Hell is just a nightmare and not in a fun or intentional way. Surprisingly, typing out highly conceptual, paradoxical layouts of a non-real space makes it hard to imagine where the characters are at all, leaving me with the sandy nothingness at the end of Wicked: For Good and nothing else. It is also a novel that is entirely comprised of intellectual flexing. Kuang seems to just want to show off for the reader how much she knows about classical literature and math and physics and metaphysics and paradoxes, rather than make the novel understandable or, you know, interesting.
Finally, the book is pitched as a love story but it’s really not. There is essentially zero Alice and Peter backstory until three quarters of the way through the book and, once again, it fails to deliver, being both underwhelming and cliche. And even when they address their feelings, it is so subtle and poorly written that you get pages past it before you ask, “Wait, was that the confession? Did they even admit explicitly now, in Hell, with death on the horizon, their feelings, or does it all still remain implied?”
This novel was a real miss for Kuang. Every other book of hers that I’ve read has had real staying power. They made me ponder moral quandaries with no clear cut answers, question what I would do if faced with impossible choices, or reflect on my own culpability in social injustices, all while filled with innovative fantasy worlds or incisive representations of modern society with memorable characters. If one reads Katabasis, all you’ll remember is a feeling of irritation that you literally went through Hell for nothing.
