Descent as Destiny: R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at GWU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

R.F. Kuang has made a career of pushing her characters into unforgiving landscapes—colonial empires (Babel), military regimes (The Poppy War), and publishing itself (Yellowface). With Katabasis, she takes that tendency to its extreme. The novel follows Alice Law, a young scholar of Magick whose obsessive pursuit of academic glory leads her on a perilous descent into Hell. It is both a mythic quest narrative and a biting satire of academia, threaded together with Kuang’s signature mix of intellect and ferocity.

A Story of Ambition and Damnation

Alice has sacrificed everything for her career: her health, her relationships, even her sanity, all in service of working with Professor Jacob Grimes, the greatest magician in the world. When Grimes dies in a magical accident—possibly one she caused—Alice sees her future collapse. In desperation, she discovers his posthumous recommendation letter as it holds the power to make or break her career. And so she does the unthinkable: she follows him into the underworld.

She is not alone. Her rival, Peter Murdoch, arrives at the same conclusion, and what begins as a duel of intellects becomes a reluctant partnership. With echoes of Dante and Orpheus guiding them, Alice and Peter set off across Hell armed only with chalk, pentagrams, and the scars of their shared past. Kuang transforms the infernal landscape into a nightmarish reflection of academic culture: endless tests, crushing expectations, and a system rigged to break even its brightest.

Hell as a Mirror

What distinguishes Katabasis from the mythic retellings it borrows from is its sharp contemporary relevance. Kuang makes Hell not merely a physical place but a metaphorical one—the suffocating world of elite academia, where survival often feels like a bargain with the devil. The novel brims with sly observations about graduate life: the petty rivalries, the gatekeeping, the way ambition corrodes human connection.

Alice herself is both brilliant and exhausting as she is driven to the point of delusion, single-minded to the edge of cruelty. Her pursuit of prestige is as harrowing as any demon she faces. Kuang refuses to soften her edges; instead, she lets readers sit with the uncomfortable truth that sometimes greatness demands, and destroys, too much.

A Reluctant Partnership

At the heart of the novel is the dynamic between Alice and Peter, adversaries bound by shared desperation. Their banter bristles with intellectual one-upmanship, but beneath it is something messier: guilt, longing, and the possibility of redemption. Kuang thrives on these thorny relationships, and here she captures the paradox of rivalry—it can sharpen you, but it can also consume you.

Kuang’s Most Ambitious Yet

While Katabasis wears the cloak of fantasy, its bones are realism: the claustrophobia of academic life, the impossible standards, the lure of validation at any cost. Kuang’s prose, taut and unflinching, brings both the grandeur of epic myth and the sting of modern satire. The novel is, at times, overwhelming—dense with allusions, relentless in pacing—but that is precisely its point. Like Alice, readers may find themselves breathless, scorched by the journey, yet unable to look away.

The Verdict

Katabasis is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be. It is R.F. Kuang at her most ferocious, dismantling the myths we tell about ambition, genius, and what it costs to chase them into the dark. If Yellowface skewered the publishing industry from aboveground, Katabasis plunges readers straight into its inferno. The result is a novel that feels both timeless and urgently of this moment—a story about how far we will go, and how far we will fall, to prove ourselves.