R.F. Kuang dreams up dark academia as literal hell

R.F. Kuang's new novel, set in an alternate universe featuring two PhD students, feels both unfamiliar and not

- Shrabonti Bagchi

Dark academia is a sub-genre in fantasy fiction, often involving schools of magic, secret societies and evil experiments in the backdrop of a scholarly environment. But the darkest of dark academia novels is not fantasy at all—in Donna Tartt's The Secret History the darkness comes not from magic but from human frailty. R.F. Kuang's much-awaited novel Katabasis (HarperCollins India) has much in common with Tartt's—ambitious, jealous, secretive academics; classical allusions; a growing grimness. But it's a hardcore fantasy novel that does something daring: it takes dark academia to its logical conclusion, literal hell.

"I am getting close to the end of a draft of 'Katabasis,' which comes out in 2025. It's another fantasy novel...," Kuang had told The Harvard Crimson back in 2023. "It started as this cute, silly adventure novel about like, 'Haha, academia is hell.' And then I was writing it and I was like, 'Oh, no, academia is hell.'"

Even without this useful cue card, I could tell that's where this novel—part satire, part adventure tale—was going within a few pages. Set in an alternate universe where magic is an acknowledged though increasingly suspect force, Katabasis (which, in Greek mythology, refers to a hero's descent into the underworld) begins in Cambridge University, which has a department of "analytic magick" ruled over by the talented and somewhat unscrupulous Professor Jacob Grimes. When Professor Grimes dies a gruesome death during a magical experiment, his PhD students Alice Law and Peter Murdoch decide to perform some forbidden and extremely risky magic of their own to descend into hell and fetch their adviser—so that he can sign their recommendation letters.