What would you do to climb atop the ivory tower?
For Alice Law, an American magician almost through her PhD at Cambridge, that answer would be: dive headfirst into the pits of hell to keep studying Magick at one of the top universities in the world. She’d shave off half her lifespan and comb through tomes of manuscripts from those who’d survived their trips to the underworld in order to save her professor, who was killed in a freak accident for which she’s at least partially to blame.
And that rescue was all going according to plan, until her academic rival, Peter Murdoch, shows up with the same idea, since their professor’s recommendation letters can pave the way to a prestigious post at any university in the world—even if Professor Jacob Grimes likely deserved whatever punishment is coming to him deep down below.
As they roam the levels of hell, R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis dares to ask: Could a tenure-track position be worth all this? Obviously not, says the sound-of-mind reader, but YES, say our intrepid post-docs as they venture on into the unknown realm of hell, ruled by an amalgamation of all the death gods of old—Lord Yama, Thanatos, Anubis, Hades, the Darkness of Many Names, Ruler of the Underworld—to beg for their professor’s soul back.
Many authors have a tick—a thing that they insist on including in their books, regardless of audience demand, and while I have never asked for the thing or known I wanted it, I’ve grown to expect the thing nonetheless. If Suzanne Collins loves her Appalachian folk songs and Philip Pullman wants to kill God, then R.F. Kuang is fascinated by the trials and tribulations of graduate school, possibly inspired by her own experiences with the same.
Like her 2023 novel Babel, Katabasis features magicians with bookish, softer-than-average magick systems suffering in the Oxbridge system. But where Babel stays mostly period-accurate to a 1830s colonial-era Britain, Katabasis plunges into the weirdness of underworld mythologies. Babel brings sarcastic footnotes, but Katabasis offers page-long treatises interspersed within chapters offering summaries of hell, the existing scholarship from past underworld sojourners, or sources that imply our protagonists have missed something critical. It’s a more whimsical style of worldbuilding—a phrase I could not use for her previous fantasy novels like Babel or The Poppy War trilogy—but I welcome it nonetheless.
Like cottagecore and old money aesthetics, dark academia has flourished on Tumblr blogs and Pinterest boards since the 2010s. Held together by tweed blazers, Oxford shoes, and a photo of some appropriately gothic or Victorian setting, the aesthetic-genre-vibe often feels older than it actually is, propelled forward by plots of secret societies or arcane obsessions. Some books have been grandfathered into the genre (e.g., The Secret History or The Picture of Dorian Gray). Others have embraced it (e.g., The Atlas Six, Ninth House, If We Were Villains, or A Deadly Education). And of course, Katabasis easily joins its ranks with its chalk-wielding magick-users who’ve bought too much into the ivory tower dream.
For me, dark academia has always had this existential tension inherent to the genre: the moody romantic and the dark-dark. The thoughts “universities can’t be disentangled from the machinations of empire” and “Oh goodness, these beautiful bookcases do make me study harder” run side-by-side, along with what if I’m the single-digit percentage privileged to earn very little in pursuit of Knowledge? It’s a tense contradiction, tightly wound by the pursuit of life of the mind, because as a friend told me recently upon graduating, “It’s the only place in the world that’ll pay me to research this incredibly niche topic for a living.”
Katabasis also appears fascinated by that tension, chronicling Alice’s underworld journey alongside vivid memories of what brought her to Cambridge in the first place and how it all went so wrong. Despite magick holding the potential for nearly anything imaginable, those who wield the chalk are still trapped in the academy, where esteemed scholars haze each other because they were once hazed, and the grunt work goes to underpaid, overworked research assistants. Leaving the research world for “industry” is the worst thing you could possibly do, and all that matters is how much you publish (or perish) in prestigious journals. If her passion for cutting-edge research got her there, emotional repression is what’s keeping her there.
Must dark academia always be dark? Who really knows? Whatever reverence I had for the often-photographed green ivy chasing stone archways at my #darkacademia university rotted after sleepless nights in aesthetic libraries, crackdowns on pro-Palestine protesters, and battles against grad student unionization. The experience left me with the feeling that a dark academia novel without long-suffering scholars is the fantasy itself, spells aside.
And yet, as the TikTok meme says, like a moth drawn to flame, “the most unstable girl you know” is applying to grad school. Alice travels through hell with a flowy, stream-of-consciousness narration that makes even me give her the side-eye. Sometimes I feel like a clinical observer from high above watching her thoughts pour out, like she’s mulling over the right words to think of before they hit the page, but somehow still finds the wrong ones—the words, “Girl, what?” burst from my mouth constantly and to great concern.
Accidentally, she winds up on long confessional monologues of the sins of the academy, ending with something akin to “Well, of course, wouldn’t everyone sacrifice their health and well-being for their research?” (No, they would not.) It’s unvarnished, constantly wandering, sometimes off-kilter, and it’s shaped her extreme need to keep going, no matter the cost. Katabasis sports a magick system based on tricking the world around its users into fulfilling their wishes; meanwhile, she learns to stop lying to herself.
The fun of Katabasis’ underworld mythos lies in deciding everything is true, cobbling together details in a way that is sketchy and imprecise. Orpheus, Dante, and anyone writing about hell are primary sources that Alice and Peter close-read for guidance. They mull over the geometry of hell, walking distances that, despite walking for hours, grow no smaller. They navigate rivers with no end, paths where you literally cannot turn back. Minor deities and dead souls cause problems everywhere because why not when they have eternity?
Surprisingly, there are few instructions on how to pass through the underworld gates or reincarnation, forcing them to decipher the meaning of death with equal weight as the meaning of life. It’s a hellish journey, and so they descend.
FICTION
By R.F. Kuang
William Morrow Large Print
Published August 26, 2025
