Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang · 2025

Katabasis is a dark‑academia fantasy in which two Cambridge postgraduate magick scholars, Alice Law and her rival Peter Murdoch, descend into a literal Hell to rescue the soul of their dead mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes. Their quest, driven by ambition, guilt and the desperate need to secure academic futures, forces them to confront mythic underworlds, ancient rites and their own traumatic pasts. Drawing on Dante’s Inferno and Orphic myth, the novel blends scholarly rivalry, magical theory, and a critique of post‑graduate precarity into a harrowing journey that questions the cost of intellectual obsession.