Hell is a university in R.F. Kuang's dark academia tale

In Katabasis, two graduate students journey to the underworld to save their professor's soul

- Olivia Ho

KATABASIS By R.F. Kuang Fantasy/Harper Voyager/ Paperback/560 pages/$35.92 ★★★★★

Academia can be hell, as anyone who has slogged through the desert of a doctorate only to tumble into the fiery pit of the job market will tell you. American author R.F. Kuang takes this literally in her sixth novel, Katabasis, in which two graduate students go to hell to retrieve their thesis adviser's soul.

Kuang, who made her name with the fantasy trilogy The Poppy War (2018 to 2020), is one of publishing's darlings. She is somehow managing to juggle pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in East Asian languages and literature at Yale University with topping bestseller lists.

Her fiction often savages the institutions she is part of. She has gone after academia once already in Babel (2022), a post-colonial critique of academic complicity in the British Empire. In Yellowface (2023), she eviscerated the publishing industry's superficial approach to diversity.

Katabasis, like Babel, both leans into and interrogates popular culture's love affair with "dark academia." Set in an alternate, magical University of Cambridge in the 1980s, it follows Alice Law, a graduate student in "analytic magick" who accidentally causes the death of her illustrious adviser, Professor Jacob Grimes.

Professor Grimes was a horrible person who made Alice's life a misery, but without his letter of recommendation, she is unlikely to get a job after graduation. She opts for katabasis — in ancient Greek, a journey to the underworld — to get him back before her funding runs out.