Katabasis on August 26, 2025 Pages: 559
Goodreads
Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.
Look, was I drawn in by the pretty sprayed edges? Yes. Did the premise sound super cool and like something I’d love? Yes. Have I enjoyed a book by Kuang up until this point? Sadly, no.
I went into Katabasis with pretty low expectations because of my history with Kuang (which is of no fault of hers, obviously, just a difference in style and taste). I wanted to love Katabasis so, so much. But it just fell kind of…flat, for me.
Alice and Peter felt like cardboard cutouts. Even after getting flashbacks and some more insight to the characters themselves, I just felt so disconnected from them as people. Nothing made me care about them, truly. I’ve felt closer to characters in other books who’s POV I’m not getting. There felt like nothing to grasp on to with them, nothing to give me any reason to root for them.
What this also means is that I did not give a shit about what happened to them at all. We have two people traveling through Hell, a decidedly not hospitable place, and I genuinely had no reason to care if they made it out the other side or not. Not only because I didn’t care about them, but none of anything we’re shown in Hell seems particularly deadly. There was only one time I was like “oh, a character might get hurt here”, but that thought lasted half a second and then I talked myself out of that happening because there were no stakes. It didn’t feel like there were any real threats to traipsing through the Underworld.
By the time we got to Grimes, I didn’t even care about the man. I didn’t care about whether he lived or died, he didn’t even feel like the same person by that point. The interaction with him was such a let down, which is ridiculous since it was the whole point of this entire journey!
Don’t even get me started about the three (or more) times Alice romanticizes the feeling she gets when she doesn’t eat. I get it, she’s an academic whose human meat machine is getting in the way of her ability to research 24/7. It just felt weird that out of all the points Kuang could have hit home about with Alice’s character, this stood out as the most prominent.
Now, admittedly, I didn’t go back and check this so if I’m wrong this is completely on me. But I felt like I was being told everything instead of shown anything. The first night they spend in Hell, we’re told it’s cold only after Alice brings out a blanket. I don’t think we got any actual descriptions of it being cold. No shivering, seeing their breath, nothing. She just looks at Peter and knows he’s cold. But we don’t. Because we aren’t there.
I will say, the issue a lot of people seemed to have with all the info dumped research of different mentions of hell? I actually really, really enjoyed. I honestly would have read a paper by her or a nonfiction book on these comparisons. The logic and math was a little harder for me to understand, but I still really appreciated it.
I just wish for a book about two academics going to Hell, there was either more academics or more of a (scary) Hell.
