Hell, Sartre famously said, is other people. Over the centuries, many other people and cultures have imagined their own underworlds: from Homer’s Odyssey, where souls drift in a shadowy haze, to Dante’s Inferno, with its architecture of punishment, to Norse mythology’s bleak realm of the dead, to the Chinese Diyu, a maze of subterranean chambers and courts.

Now, it’s R.F. Kuang’s turn. The prolific young Asian-American writer earlier made a splash with Babel, a fantasy of language, colonialism and the cost of translation, as well as Yellowface, a satirical, topical look at the state of the publishing industry. Katabasis (Harper Collins, 2025), her new novel, combines the fantastical dark academia of the first with the satirical notes of the second.

The title literally means “to go down”, referring to a journey into the underworld, which is what the novel’s characters embark on. Chief among them is Alice, and it’s not a coincidence that she’s named after the Lewis Carroll character who also fell down a rabbit hole. Kuang’s Alice is a promising graduate student in Cambridge in the 1980s, studying “Analytic Magick”, a field that combines philosophy, logic and mathematics in order to understand and bend the laws of the known universe.

Alice’s dilemma is that she believes her hastily prepared spell caused the death of her professor, the esteemed Nobel laureate and academy president Jacob Grimes. She resolves to venture into Hell to find him and obtain “the golden recommendation letter that opened every door.” She is joined on this quest by Peter, a fellow student whom Alice finds “perfect, brilliant, infuriating”. Their tortuous and changing relationship provides much of the book’s emotional ballast.

Once cast into Hell’s strange and shifting landscapes, the duo realise that they have to make their way through its Eight Courts, each one defined by earthly sins such as Pride, Lust, and Greed. Souls in this infernal region, they learn, travel in some shape or form to the domain of Lord Yama, “that is, Hades, Anubis, King of the Dead, Lord of the Underworld, Judge of Life and Death, or however else one wishes to perceive him”.

In an ingenious metaphorical twist, Kuang frames Hell as a university campus, with each court being a distorted mirror of an academic location: a library, a lecture hall, institutional spaces, and so on. This premise enables Kuang to throw sharp barbs at academia. She gleefully sends up the long hours and workloads, the departmental politics and competitiveness, the specialised jargon, and much else besides.

Alice and Peter have to make their way through these stages of Hell, coming across allies and adversaries, confronting creatures and shapes who were formerly human, as well as a cat named Archimedes. They learn to perform bloody rituals, fight off malign apparitions, and have to take care not to be swept into the river Lethe, a “great expanse, fathomless and immeasurably wide”, that washes away memories and prepares souls for what comes next.

This is all very well as far as it goes, but it goes too far and often gets bogged down by its own ingenuity. The narrative includes philosophical asides on the nature of being, and can also become over-explicatory, especially when it comes to the nature of the magic that has to be deployed to navigate the nether regions.

These include arcana such as Curry’s Paradox, the Banach-Tarski Paradox, the True Contradiction, Ramanujan’s Summation, and Setiya’s Modifications.

Further, every now and then, there are backstories in which we’re told at length about the beleaguered couple’s past and their academic work. Alice’s tangled relationship with Peter, in particular, takes up much space, with romantic tensions and resolutions that feel telegraphed instead of genuine.

All of this burdens the narrative, with many sections coming across as more clever than compelling. On the other end of the scale, Kuang’s world-building is evocative and strong, with hypnotic depictions of Hell’s habitations, hinterlands, and horizons. Alas, it’s not nearly enough to salvage the whole.

Katabasis, then, impresses in concept but stumbles in execution. Its metaphors are rich, settings immersive, and ambition undeniable, but the book is ultimately weighed down by excessive exposition. Like Alice, the reader may admire the spectacle of the underworld’s architecture, but still struggle to find a way through.

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