Review: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

4 October 2025

Cover of Katabasis
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
⚠️ This review contains spoilers!

The main character is a PhD student at Cambridge, studying a form of academic magic that involves a lot of drawing circles and logical proofs with chalk on the ground. Her professor - the top guy in her field - is dead after an experiment gone wrong, and she’s focused on opening a portal to Hell to get him back. Not for altruistic reasons, mind you, but because she’s decided that she absolutely needs his influence to help open doors in her future career. (Yes, this is a pretty neurotic reason). She’s joined by a fellow graduate student, and together the two of them journey through all the realms of hell to find their professor.

Similar to Kuang’s Yellowface, the main character is a flawed one. She’s overly fixated on her academic career, but the book does a decent job of showing why she is the way she is, so I’m not mad about it. There’s also a lot of philosophy and academia references in here, some of which go over my head. And apparently from reading this Reddit thread there’s a fair few references to Dante’s Inferno in it as well.

Reveal spoilers

Alice is joined by Peter, a mysterious but very smart fellow PhD student, who runs hot and cold, and Alice can't quite figure out what his motivations are (but she's half in love with him). It turns out he has Crohn's, which is why he's always going MIA due to hospital stays or reoccurrences of it. The book leaves Peter's absenteeism and sudden coldness as a mystery for the first half, so it's an interesting twist once that's finally solved (albeit a little silly, but hey we all have our insecurities). And in the end it turns out that he loved Alice all along as well. Alice straight-up betrays Peter in the middle of the book, and she's so depressed (almost suicidal) for parts of the book. But it all ties up (too) nicely at the end when she revives Peter from the dead and then they go back to enjoy their lives in the real world, happily ever after. I mean, I probably would have been pissed off if the story had a sad ending where Peter did stay dead, but considering the overall depressing tone of the book the ending felt a bit too nice, if that makes sense.

Overall though I quite enjoyed this book! It had a really interesting concept. From reading reviews online, it seems this one wasn’t as well-received as I thought it would be - it seems like RF Kuang can be a bit divisive. I suppose since RF Kuang’s books comment on themes like colonialism, sexism, racism, etc. and she can be a bit heavy-handed in her approach, people try to take it more seriously than they would something like ACOTAR, but then are also quicker to find flaws with it as well.