Academia is hell, literally!

Katabasis: Academia Is Hell (Literally)

4.5⭐

R.F. Kuang did it again.

Katabasis is layered, brilliant, and dripping with research you can practically feel seeping through the pages. This woman doesn’t just write; she builds worlds. On the surface, the premise sounds straightforward: two grad students, Alice Law and Peter Murdock, forced to set aside their rivalry to march into the underworld and save their professor. You think, “Okay, myth retelling, I know the drill.” But nope. Kuang twists it into something sharper, darker, smarter: academia itself as hell. Cutthroat. Isolating. Bureaucratic. Brutally personal. She nails that friction between the mystical and the mundane, and the result is so unsettling it almost hums under your skin.

The prose? Razor-sharp, unapologetic, and academic in the best ways, dense with ideas, but never lifeless. Unlike Babel, which leaned into its heft, Katabasis feels tighter, smoother, yet just as devastating when it lands. And oh, when the emotions land? They don’t just settle in your chest, they gut-punch you and leave you gasping. The non-linear structure spirals instead of descending, weaving flashbacks, grief, and reckonings into a momentum that sneaks up on you until you realize you’re fully trapped.

And then there’s the underworld. Forget the romanticized mythscapes,Kuang paints it as an aging, broken-down infrastructure. Dysfunctional. Crumbling. A system groaning under its own weight. 

That one conceptual move reframes death and memory in ways that are chillingly original. Add Alice and Peter’s dynamic, rivals-to-lovers dripping with grudges, buried secrets, and enough angst to ruin your night’s sleep—and the book balances mythic stakes with raw, human vulnerability.

So why not 5 stars? Honestly, the pacing dragged in a few places, and yeah, it bugged me. But that’s nitpicking when the book has this much bite. And no, you don’t need to have memorized the Western canon to enjoy this—Kuang lays it all out clearly. That said, the reading list circulating online is packed with gems, so if you want extra layers, dive in.

At its core, Katabasis is about loss, identity, grief, and the brutal ways we try (and often fail) to make sense of ourselves and others. Alice and Peter aren’t just racing against time,they’re wrestling with monstrous dangers, a tangled past, and secrets sharp enough to cut through everything they’ve built. The deeper they go, the higher the risk,not just of dying, but of being absorbed into hell itself.

For me, this wasn’t just a highlight of the year, it’s one of those rare books that scratched places I didn’t even know needed scratching. It left me haunted by characters who felt alive, a vision of the underworld that was fresh and terrifying, and a story that refused to let me go.

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Katabasis book