Katabasis by R.F. Kuang follows protagonists Alice Law and Peter Murdoch as they voyage into Hell to rescue their deceased professor, Jacob Grimes. The novel, while brilliant and ambitious in theory, is rendered frustratingly mundane due to incohesive storytelling and a refusal to fully engage in any of the conversations it attempts to have. Before we dive in, two important things must be noted: first, this will be filled with spoilers galore, and I will be referencing the ARC, not the published edition, since that is the copy I read, so the page count might differ slightly.

To open, one of Katabasis’s defining flaws is its presentation of information. Almost nothing in the narrative feels earned, because information is not naturally revealed, it is simply given, largely in chunks. The novel goes on one too many self-indulgent tangents on history, mathematics, theory and even presents interludes that are meant to establish the world, but the placements of these interludes are inconsistent, do not tie directly into the story, and just feel lazy.

Additionally there is a noticeable lack of foreshadowing. Two examples of effective foreshadowing can be found in Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir, and the Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, spoilers ahead.

In Gideon the Ninth, there is a character named Protesilaus. In Greek mythology, Protesilaus is the first hero to die at Troy, and in Gideon, Protesilaus is the first man who dies in the Lyctor Trials. In the Fifth Season, we discover that Essun, Syentite, and Damaya are all the same character, and one of the ways this is beautifully hinted at is by the fact that there is currently an environmental disaster taking place in Essun’s chapters, known as a “season”, and there is no mention of such an event in the POV’s of Syentite or Damaya, since they occur decades prior.

In Katabasis, we are given the eventual knowledge that for the past year, Alice has been able to recall everything she’s ever seen perfectly due to a pentagram carved onto her skin by Professor Grimes. On page 152 it is said that, in regard to Alice, “her mind now functioned as an on-call encyclopedia”. The narrative, however, does not present Alice’s memory as anything otherworldly. In fact, like Peter, her memory is presented as something that is a product of rigorous academic study: they have good memories because they cannot suffer the consequences of having poor ones.

The same issue occurs with Peter. We are told later in the narrative that his mystique, poor punctuality, and frequent absences are a result of his chronic illness. The explanation the narrative gives is that he is able to get away with this because he’s simply that brilliant. On page 341 he says, “No one resented him for his absences; they only got so much more excited when he showed up. Murdoch was a rare presence; his appearance a blessing. In a world defined by perception, Peter was learning now to construct a most compelling front. Geniuses could be excused any idiosyncrasy. They would forgive an ailing body, Peter determined, so long as they were intimidated by the mind. And oh, what a mind he would become.” 

The problem is that in Alice’s POV we are given no indication that Peter is struggling in any capacity. The text tells us that Peter’s brilliance allows him to bend the rules, and we are given no reason to doubt this explanation. As a result, the eventual revelation of his illness feels unearned, because the reader was never allowed to suspect or deduce it themselves. A red herring only works if it conceals the truth in plain sight. Here, “Peter’s genius” is presented not as a cover for his condition but as the only truth available, leaving no space for discovery.

A potential solution would have been if the narrative allowed Alice to become curious. It is mentioned that after Peter’s worst flare up, he was picked up by an ambulance and taken to a hospital. Not a soul finds out this happened, which is a missed opportunity by the narrative to make this event the talk of the town: local ivy league darling found unresponsive in the bathroom and admitted to the hospital. Or better yet, Peter says himself on page 351, “six weeks later Peter returned on shaky feet to the department”. Considering the lengths the novel goes to highlight the connection between Alice and Peter (which doesn’t work because they have zero chemistry outside of proximity), it’s almost baffling that she didn’t wonder where he’d gone for a month and a half.

This would have been a beautiful way to not only give the main character some agency, but to let the story follow a natural chain of events. Alice could have investigated and come to her own, incorrect conclusions that would have served the narrative function: planting the seed that Peter Murdoch is hiding something. The novel could have also tied this into her eidetic memory. For example: if Peter hid his weight loss incredibly well but Alice deduced it anyway since she remembered what his handwriting looked like pre-surgery when he weighed more and used more pressure to write. If she mentioned this to anyone it plants yet another seed: how could Alice Law possibly remember that?

Let us now pivot to the subject of flashbacks. Katabasis falls into this trap, and it is made all the more glaringly obvious by the fact that we have a story that is quite literally set in Hell, yet almost all the relevant narrative information is revealed to us. . .through flashbacks. 

The most egregious display of this, is through two of the largest narrative reveals: that Peter has Crohn’s disease, and that Professor Grimes tried, almost forcefully, to have sex with Alice. From pages 300-323 and 334-356 this information is dumped on the reader through flashbacks. Peter and Alice are sitting in a hole in the ground in the circle of Violence, and they are confiding information that would have resonated on a much deeper level had the author not completely missed the opportunity to lean into Hell as a place of revelation of sin. 

Throughout this novel I found myself constantly asking: why set this story in Hell if Hell was going to be THIS underutilized? In response to this, I must mention House of Hades, by Rick Riordan, spoiler incoming.

While in Tartarus with Annabeth, Percy winds up in a forest populated by demonic spirits. These spirits are able to inflict all the curses made on Percy from the monsters he’s killed over the years with their dying breaths. One of the curses does not affect Percy at all. It affects Annabeth. She calls for him, and when he tries to go to her, she is always out of reach, shouting his name, asking why he abandoned her. At first Percy doesn’t understand this curse, he says he’s never abandoned anyone. The spirits are too eager to remind him. Percy blanches. He says no. She’d never curse me. Except she did. Several books ago, in Battle of the Labyrinth, he met a goddess trapped on an island. She nursed him back to health, cared for him, and offered to keep him safe from the impending god war. Percy thought about it, almost acquiesced, but said no, his friends needed him, his family, the world. Annabeth. But he promised he would come back, he promised he wouldn’t forget about her, that he would make sure the gods freed her from her eternal prison. The truth hits Percy like a fist. He did none of those things. He forgot about her. He abandoned Calypso. The pain is twofold, because Percy has been manipulating his and Annabeth’s guide, a titan named Bob who lost his memory and found himself in the service of Hades as his janitor, due to Percy’s efforts in a previous book. Percy is forced to reconcile with his own negligence, he has been a terrible friend to Bob, and a worse one to Calypso.

Hell, as presented in Katabasis, does not challenge Alice or Peter in nearly the same way. They are not forced to contend with one another’s darkness, or to address what they’ve done in their pasts that would make them worthy residents of these circles. The narrative loves to constantly remind us how smart Alice and Peter are, how brilliant and intellectual this book is, yet it doesn’t use Hell to PROVE what it’s telling us. Because Alice and Peter are scholars and Hell is this commonly researched and heavily documented phenomenon, the emphasis feels skewed. We spend more time on Peter and Alice conjecturing about Hell rather than experiencing it.

Imagine this: drop Alice and Peter into the underworld, then have them find out Hell is nothing like anything that has been recorded anywhere. Maybe Dante, Milton, all the others, they got it wrong, or maybe everyone just perceives Hell differently. Regardless you've got these reason oriented individuals forced to reconcile with a realm that doesn't obey logic and that they know nothing about. Now they are able to do what obsessive, intellectual minds love to do: research. This would have given the reader the opportunity to learn about Hell with them, in real time through trial and error. Additionally, it would have allowed their academic backgrounds to directly impact the plot.

The reason House of Hades worked so well is Percy and Annabeth’s time in Tartarus served as a catalyst for growth. And because no mortal had ever been to Tartarus, we went on a journey of discovery with the characters. As a result, HoH  felt like an experience. Katabasis feels like an explanation, like I’m being lectured to. Yes, Alice and Peter discover a few things, like how blood is needed for chalk to work, or if you die in Hell it’s permanent, but they still largely know what to expect and where to go. They understand Hell on a fundamental level, and as a result, there is little room for explanation, because the narrator already possesses 80% of the requisite information

And it must also be noted, Hell feels so incredibly underwhelming and poorly fleshed out due to the unimportance of the circles themselves. The characters breeze through the courts of Hell in an almost laughable amount of time. I’ve tallied the pages and done the math: roughly 35% of the novel is spent in the actual circles of Hell.

There are 110 ten pages total of flashbacks, or roughly 20% of the narrative. Which means if you add that 20% to the remaining 45% of the novel, you get a book that is about Hell and its courts, yet 65% of the narrative is either a flashback or Alice and Peter traveling through Hell. One could make the argument that traveling is mildly interesting, except not really tho, cause Hell outside of the circles is bland. We are told on page 276, “Past Wrath, it all gets more classically infernal” and that never happens. There is almost nothing distinguishing most of the circles from real locations on Earth save a few distinct landmarks. Cruelty has a couple white structures with skeletal cages attached to them that are filled with Shades. Apart from that? Nothing but sand and dunes. The same for Tyranny, but with a tower, and on this tower the Greek furies: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. Once you get past them? More dunes, and drifting pieces of paper that belong to the dissertations the Shades are writing. Mind you, these are supposed to be the deepest circles of Hell, and Alice says on page 389, as she is deep in the trenches of Tyranny, “She was dazed enough to find this pretty, this geometrical neatness.” I’m sorry, are we in Hell, or are we on Arrakis? There aren’t even any demons outside of the furies, which just feels like another example of dropping the ball. The back cover blurb describes Katabasis as “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi”, but how is this uninspired version of Hell supposed to be comparable to Dante, which is known for being especially grim, when there aren’t even demons? Neither is this novel like Piranesi, because it takes itself way too seriously and lacks the whimsy and charm that allowed that novel to sing.

It almost feels like because Hell is such unfamiliar territory that the author is choosing to tackle it through a familiar lens: which is academia, her background. Better yet, this really just feels like self-insert fanfiction. Rebecca wrote this novel while pursuing her doctorate at Yale, and Alice is clearly meant to be her, and Peter her husband, and just like her, the two of them are pursuing their PhDs. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Hell, my debut novel, A Poor Man’s Prose, started out as a self-insert fanfiction, but after rigorous rounds of editing, I was forced to get grounded in who these characters actually are, where their wounds live, what they want, and the obstacles in the way of their goals. Katabasis feels like it never had a microscope held up to its premise. Is this a story about academia in Hell because that’s what the story needed to be, or because that’s what Rebecca wanted it to be?

Honestly? There are moments the novel feels like it’s suffering from personality disorder, it’s so thematically unsure of itself. The narrative attempts to dip its toes in satire, like with the offhand mention that creative writers always end up in the Circle of Pride, or there being an entire bazaar in the City of Dis dedicated to providing Shades with writing tools to help them craft the perfection dissertation so they can reincarnate. And right when it looks like the book might be having fun with itself, the momentum is ruined by yet another exposition dump.

Even its initial premise of “academia is hell” is abandoned a fourth of the way in. Pride is depicted as a library, and Desire a student center, but none of the other circles are presented like this. There’s so much that could’ve been done here. Take Desire. It’s a bunch of people having sex, and indulging, and it’s portrayed as a den of depravity which. . .not sure how this is any different from Lust, but okay. My question becomes this, why not use the circles of Hell to facilitate conversations around academic abuse, and mental health, situations which directly tie to Alice and Peter? 

Imagine for a moment, if the circle of treachery from Dante’s Inferno had been kept (I am still incredibly unclear on why Katabais removed circles like Sloth and Envy, to replace them with new ones such as Cruelty and Tyranny, only to not do anything interesting with the additions), this would have been the best place to reveal that Grimes stole Peter’s work and address plagiarism/academic theft. 

The circle of Wrath could have portrayed Grimes’ silent fury towards Alice after she rejected him and/or even explored how anger manifests and expresses itself in these settings. Picture  if this played with Peter’s own darkness, and he was forced to confront the murderous thoughts he had when Grimes betrayed him. That could have given him some depth, he was otherwise severely lacking. Even Alice! Homegirl wanted to bring Grimes’ soul back into his Frankenstein-esque body fully aware this would cause him an unreasonable (albeit deserved) amount of pain. If that isn’t wrath, idk what is.  

Pride would have been a beautiful circle to reveal Peter’s stubbornness with his illness and Alice’s decision to choose Grimes as a professor knowing his reputation. Circling back to Desire, this was the perfect setting to foreshadow what happened with Grimes and Alice. In this circle, yes, Alice has a panic attack, but the narrative makes this seem almost as a physical response to the vulgarness of sex, and how carnal it is, this mashing of bodies, flesh pressed against flesh. In fact, despite what happened, despite how Professor Grimes is a known womanizer and can’t keep his hands to himself, Alice is adamant that he isn’t in this circle (which, sidebar, Alice’s contradictory and inconsistent thoughts towards Grime are a whole issue and a half). If her insistence was “he’s not here” as a way to avoid being reminded of what he almost did to her, that would have worked, but that isn’t the route the narrative takes. 

It could have even used Desire to showcase professors taking advantage of and sleeping with their students. Why not have Desire be a continuous loop of people in power in their worst moments mistreating their station? Or better yet, why not actually use Desire to explore the kind of wounds that live in students? Look at everything Alice has willingly subjected herself to for a scrap of approval from Professor Grimes. Is that not a desire for validation? Imagine what it would have done for her character and arc if Hell held up a mirror and forced her to confront sinners/shades who shared her same hurts and flaws? Imagine if demons played active roles in these circles, i.e, as the professors, and the faculty, and fed on negative emotions, so they perpetuated the cycle of academic abuse to feed on it? There is a whole metaphor in there about the continuation of  harm in academia and how it is a system people are willingly participating in and benefiting from. 

You see what I'm getting at? Right now, Alice and Peter confront their pasts in ways that don’t feel earned because we are constantly reminded of how we are in Hell, and yet Hell never feels like anything outside of mildly interesting set dressing. Hell would have been a perfect catalyst, since both of them are too stubborn to change unless forced, and these circles could have addressed the realities of academia while also giving these characters solid arcs. Plus, it would have allowed Peter and Alice to be vulnerable and actually get to know one another outside of all the trauma bonding they do courtesy of having Grimes as their advisor. This could have allowed the romance aspect to at least become somewhat salvaged.

I would have also loved if Hell forced these two to interrogate their own internalized toxicity. The novel brings up competition between women in academia, and how rare it is for there to be camaraderie between women in the field, yet offers absolutely no pushback or deeper conversation regarding Alice’s own internalized misogyny and her attitude towards women. On page 300 she says, “She couldn’t stand those screeching activists who believed the only politically just thing was to become a lesbian.” She even attributes the reason to Elspeth’s suicide as her not wanting it badly enough (Elspeth as a whole could warrant at least another two pages. Her helping Alice at the end of the book felt both out of character and entirely unearned. She was entirely in the right to turn her back on them the way she did). 

The novel wants to attribute all of Alice and Peter’s self-destructive habits to their desire to win Professor Grimes’s approval almost as a way of saying “instructors do not realize how much power they wield over their students”, yet ignores how both Alice and Peter was deliberately self-sabotaging long before they even met Grimes. Peter, with his belief that suffering in silence and refusing to ask for help is somehow noble, and Alice, who glorifies all the ways in which she is able to neglect her basic needs. By far the largest issue is that the novel attempts to convince the reader that these characters have changed, but how can they, when they have not been forced to sit with and reconcile their demons? At the end of the novel, Katabasis wants you to believe that Alice is able to, finally, after everything, see Jacob Grimes for what he is. On page 522 it says, as she is contemplating him, “She had faced down the ends of time; had escaped from the Rebel Citadel; had vanquished the Kripkes; had ripped a cat open with her bare hands and eaten its heart and made its skull a shrine in the deserts of Dis. These sort of experiences were very transformative. They gave her a bit more clairty on–well, everything.” Here is the problem: Alice, from the very beginning, has always seen Jacob Grimes for what he is. She has had no delusions about his character. On page 302 she says, “It was her fault, see, because when she first heard that Professor Grimes had a problem keeping his hands to himself around female students, she’d felt a thrill of excitement. Oh sure-she’d professed disgust in public, and then in private wondered if she was pretty enough, delicate and thin enough, to attract that same attention.” The argument can be made, that Alice has not changed, not in the fundamental sense, and this evidenced by what is said on page 523, “Professor Grimes was not good at being dead, did not have the fortitude of mind, hadn’t come close to conquering Hell, and Alice found this deeply disappointing. It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants and they devastated you by being so human. This was the saddest thing. The loss of  faith. If he really were a giant, she would have followed him still.” True growth would have been her choice to walk away from him regardless if he was a giant or not. It would not matter who he was or what he did, because she was the one who changed. Instead, her rejection of him is because he is changed, not she. Peter and Alice do not know themselves any better, only each other, and that is not at all the same thing.

To wrap this up, because this has been a yap session and a half, Katabasis had huge lofty goals, none of which it was ultimately able to reach, leaving the reader with a book where the only interesting thing about it is the title.