December 2025 Book Club: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

 

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Quite a few things are seen in hell that are not described in detail but mentioned, like orgies, bestiality; Flashbacks of things like inappropriate student/teacher relationships, etc.

  

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:

The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom. 

 

This will probably be an unpopular opinion but I've had quite a few of those over the years. I've purposely avoided this author's books in the past because, quite frankly, my gut instinct was that I would find them boring. The only reason I read this one is because it got picked as our book club read for this month. It turns out I was right, this was so incredibly boring. How do you make a trip through hell boring? Somehow this author found a way. 

Not only did I find this book boring, I also found it to be pretentious, with characters I didn't like. I never warmed up to the main character. I did warm up to Peter but it took far too long for the book to reveal his secrets. And that's a problem I have with this book in general. Information is withheld for no good reason, and things are revealed slowly over the course of the book for no good reason. To me it didn't make any sense that they were going to hell to find this professor. I'm not going to say why it didn't make any sense because I'm trying to avoid spoilers. 

There was a lot of academia in this book and it read like a textbook at times. I really couldn't relate to people who wanted to spend most of their lives in academia, especially someone who would give up 30 years of their life to go to hell and get a professor so he could help them academically. Not worth it! If you want to take a slow stroll through hell while philosophizing and reflecting on unpleasant life experiences, then this book is for you.