Finished 4-24-2026 on my lunch break at work.
Rating: 3/5 Bone Things.
Initial Thoughts
I’ll begin by saying that I’m a huge fan of Katabasis author R.F. Kuang’s work. Regretfully, I’ve not read Yellowface, but I still can’t stop talking about Babel and The Poppy War series years after finishing them. I’m not the most eloquent when it comes to describing why a story works for me, especially when I’m rambling to my poor boyfriend, but I always come back to this: Kuang is excellent at making me deeply sad. That counts for something. If an author can make me feel the kind of dread and heartbreak that those books did, they have accomplished something meaningful.
More importantly, Kuang is known for tackling complex themes like imperialism, racism, and internal character struggles with an intensity that sticks with me. Her style is an interesting blend of fantasy and the grit and pain of reality; the fantasy often takes a backseat, yet she still manages to weave it into a clear, magical world.
When I heard she was writing a book about graduate students traveling to Hell for their advisor, my interest was piqued. I may not have studied Analytic Magick, but I did, unfortunately, go to grad school. I work in academia. I hate to say I’ve met more than one Professor Grimes in my time.
“This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
In Katabasis, we follow Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two PhD candidates in the Analytic Magick program at Cambridge under the infamous Professor Grimes. The magic revolves around logic, paradoxes, and thought experiments. If you can convince the universe of something – such as proving there is no exit to a room or that you technically are not moving – it becomes true. These spells are achieved through carefully crafted chalk pentagrams, which hold magical significance due to the ancient fossils they contain. If that doesn’t quite make sense, don’t worry – I don’t think I fully grasped the magic system at any point in this read.
When Alice accidentally leaves a pentagram incomplete, Professor Grimes faces a most horrendous death. Unfortunately for her, aside from the brains and blood she has to clean up, Professor Grimes is the only person capable of helping her finish her degree. Naturally, the only option is to descend into Hell to bring him back.
Spoiler Discussion
In my opinion, Katabasis was okay. It wasn’t boring; the premise is clever, the emotional beats are strong, and there were things I genuinely loved. I mentioned before how Kuang is an expert at making my heart ache, and this was no exception. The unraveling of Alice and Peter was the strongest part of the novel for me, and their background chapters were some of my favorites.
As a woman in academia, Alice’s experience hit a bit too close to home. Thematically, the book dealt with abuse and manipulation in academia, sexism, disability, love, jealousy, suicidal ideation, and struggling to find meaning outside of achievement.
I found Alice to be an incredibly compelling protagonist. Before reading this book, I saw criticisms claiming that she lacked substance and that her character was anti-feminist, but I honestly disagree with that interpretation. Alice is flawed in the same way Rin from The Poppy War is flawed: ambitious, obsessive, emotionally immature, and deeply desperate for validation. I don’t agree with Alice’s opinions of women, but if we pay attention to how they are presented, it’s clear these aren’t inherent to her character. These are things she was taught.
When someone is raised and educated in an environment as competitive and male-dominated as Alice’s, with Professor Grimes as her primary role model, it makes sense that she internalizes those attitudes. Her need for Grimes’s approval is devastating because she fully understands the damage he has done to her and still cannot break free from wanting his validation. Kuang does an excellent job making Grimes feel genuinely repulsive. Every interaction between him and Alice made me feel tense; even before the full extent of his manipulation becomes clear, you can feel Alice shrinking around him.
“No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him – but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
Peter is someone I think we have all known; that person who always looks perfect, is good at everything, and does it all without breaking a sweat. He is what Alice dreams of being, putting in less than half the effort she does. This resentment bleeds through the story at every turn, yet it also hints at a romantic bond between the two. Eventually, we learn that Peter suffers from Crohn’s disease, and his life has been anything but easy. In fact, he nearly killed himself trying to study despite his sickness, and he was almost kicked out by Professor Grimes. Grimes even took credit for Peter’s breakthrough while he was in the hospital. Again, my heart was aching through the entirety of Peter’s background. Kuang does a magnificent job of expressing her character’s pain.
“He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
“It was so humiliating the way she’d lingered, hoping for his attention—like a dog that didn’t know that it had been abandoned, that kept on coming back. He was not rude to her. In fact he was perfectly polite, wearing that classic Murdoch smile. He gave her the same kind attentiveness that he would to any stranger. But this hurt, for she had thought they were anything but.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
After these revelations break the tension that’s been keeping them apart, Alice and Peter finally begin to accept their love for each other. This book is by no means a romance, but these two have more chemistry than any romance novel I have read (to be fair, it’s not a lot). By the time Peter sacrifices himself to save Alice, despite the anger throughout the story, it hurts.
Alice, navigating the circles of Hell after Peter’s death, contains some of the novel’s bleakest and most beautiful writing. The sections involving Dis and the endless monotony of the shades’ existence become almost exhausting to read, but in a way that felt intentional. Hell is not burning; the punishment is spiritually numbing. Hell is a caricature of academia.
That said, this is also where the novel started to lose me a bit. As we delve deeper into the magic system and the intricacies of Hell as the setting – the Dialetheia, Gertrude, the Rebel Citadel – I found myself struggling to follow the logic. I understood the emotional trajectory of Alice’s journey much more clearly than the mechanics. Still, I think the core idea is compelling: Alice survives The Rebel Citadel and everything after because she finally begins to value life beyond achievement and validation, a lesson I feel I need to learn myself.
“It was the absolute farce of it all, said Elspeth. One day it all seemed so silly to me, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it’s rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You’re a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair’s godson. Once you have a job it doesn’t get better-do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean what’s the fucking point? I couldn’t keep up the charade, but I also couldn’t see the value in anything else, so I put a stop to it all. I could not care anymore.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
One of my favorite elements of this story was the Lethe, such a foreboding presence throughout the narrative. Forgetting can be worse than death, or it can be a release. I found it interesting how afraid the shades were, and it makes sense. Our memories are the only things that tie us to the world. Without them, we are nothing. Despite its ominous aura, reading Magnolia and Theophrastus following her husband, Nicomachus, into the river felt like a peaceful conclusion, very much at odds with their characters’ earlier selves.
The ending worked well emotionally for me. Seeing Grimes stripped of the godlike image that Alice and Peter built around him was incredibly satisfying. After spending the entire story watching these students destroy themselves for his approval, seeing Alice choose Peter over Grimes felt like a worthy conclusion to the book’s central themes.
“Now, she saw him more clearly than ever; in part because she was no longer so scared of looking, and in part because she only saw what he chose to show. Just an ordinary man, puffing himself up, daring around for any way out of his predicament.”
― Rebecca F. Kuang, Katabasis
As you can probably tell, characters are probably my favorite part of any book, and Katabasis surely delivered there. My biggest struggle was with the magic system itself. I enjoyed the easier-to-grasp logic discussions, but much of the logic behind the pentagrams didn’t quite make sense to me, and when she started talking about calculus, I blacked out.
Even with my frustrations, a lot of this worked well for me; I think my expectations were just a bit high for another book from one of my favorite authors. While this didn’t devastate me in the way that Babel or The Poppy War did, it gave me a lot to think about.
I’m curious what you think! Let me know your thoughts and what went over my head.
Thanks for reading.
“Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
L. Dutch
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