Breakaway Books

Authored by R.F. Kuang; Published August 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

Although Katabasis is a love story of sorts set in a fantasy world, it’s just about the furthest thing from a romantasy novel. There’s far too many logic puzzles and musings on existential philosophy—but that doesn’t mean it’s not magnetic in its own way.

In Katabasis, rival graduate students Alice and Peter find themselves journeying into hell together to reclaim the soul of their deceased thesis adviser Professor Grimes. Dueling continually over their conflicting theories, they must band together to traverse pride, desire, greed, and all the realms of hell to find Grimes. However, hell has more than a few surprises waiting for them, and no magician has ever successfully made it to hell and back before. Alice is determined to be the first, as long as it means she can finally get her doctorate in magic. 

It is clear almost immediately that this novel makes a farce of academia. The lengths to which Alice and Peter are willing to go in order to get their doctorate—literally to hell and back—are a little ridiculous, and the more that is revealed about their experience with their adviser, the more ludicrous it seems. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get frustrated with Alice, whose tunnel vision pushes her to cast aside everything that is not a stepping stone to succeeding with Professor Grimes. It’s hard for me to imagine giving up so much for any goal. With this set up, her evolution as a character is somewhat predictable, as she learns to value life apart from mere academic achievement, and to stop and smell the figurative and literal roses. The romance that ensues between her and Peter is a big part of it, and as always when I read romances, I wanted to shake both of them for their repeated miscommunications and just get them to say how they really feel. 

Kuang’s rendition of hell may not be what you expect. The first three levels, passion, desire, and greed, are largely what you would picture, but after that, the regions become far more abstract. If you come to this novel looking for a straightforward moral lesson to be learned from a journey through hell, you are sure to be disappointed. I worry that I didn’t experience the full richness of the novel because I haven’t read any of the previous descriptions of hell that Peter and Alice repeatedly refer to as source texts (think Dante’s Inferno). Nevertheless, I loved the depiction of the villains that terrorize the underworld in this novel, who are a completely unique creation. Don’t be fooled though: This is not just a romp through the wastelands of hell, in which Peter and Alice must vanquish foe after foe. It is far more introspective than a straightforward action novel.

Katabasis will set your mind alight with logic problems, philosophical dilemmas, and different theories of the afterlife. And a little romance never hurts either!