words by Jocelyn Howarth | photo by Tony Luong

What is Hell? Or, more specifically, where is Hell? Last week, I realised that Hell for me is the waiting room at the local walk-in centre. No windows, stark lights, plastic chairs that offer no support. If I look back at my life, I find that Hell has had many identities. The Avanti West Coast train service, for example, has plagued me since childhood with its torturous rocking sensation. Social media, too, is Hell. So is Lidl. There are many iterations of Hell — most of them more universally acknowledged than my own examples. The general consensus, though, is that no one steps into their Hell unless it’s an inevitable necessity.

For R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis (2025) narrator Alice Law and her companion Peter Murdoch, their descent into Hell is necessary. As post-grads at Cambridge in the famously gruelling Department of Analytic Magick, they must seek out the recently-deceased Professor Grimes — their supervisor for the course — in order to ensure that they pass. There is no choice in the matter, especially not for Alice, who feels responsible for the freak accident that resulted in Grimes’s death. But it is not solely guilt that drives her. She has committed her life to her education, to her passion for magick and its mysteries, and to fail at this late stage is out of the question. In Kuang’s words on her release-day social media post, Katabasis is a ‘deeply personal’ book, drawing from her own experience in higher education and its intense effect on the mind and body. Alice and Peter are explorations of those struggles, and united by their passion for learning and connection to their lost professor, they descend into Hell.

Despite Alice and Peter being well-versed on the many versions of Hell, across centuries of literature, they, like the reader, have no idea what they will find upon their descent. It raises the question: how did R. F. Kuang possibly decide what Hell was going to look like? I attended a talk with Kuang at Manchester Literature Festival just prior to this book’s release, and she spoke at length about the different iterations of Hell she examined. Amongst the complexities of different mythologies across time and the overlaps of religions still prominent today, a few versions were indelibly impactful. Dante’s Inferno is probably one of the most famous descriptions of Hell, but Kuang also pointed toward Virgil’s The Aeneid, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. A hefty reading list, to say the least. These influences are evident in Katabasis. Kuang draws references from myths and connects them to the characters’ surroundings using Alice’s extensive knowledge, though at no point does the novel feel like an analytical essay, as the frequent references only bolster an already immersive story. Expect a river of memory erasure, the classic circles of Hell presented in unexpected ways, and a few surprise adversaries — for what is Hell if not a place filled with enemies?

Kuang’s style across all her novels causes a great deal of debate in the online book community. For some, she is too academic, too methodical, not trusting enough of her readers, and prone to over-explain as a result. Others find her words utterly absorbing, relish the detail of topics they never thought to think about, and become so invested in the journeys of her characters that their pain becomes the reader’s pain. In Katabasis, not only does Kuang explore iterations of Hell; she also delves into philosophy and logic, and even dabbles in geometry (apparently assisted by her husband, who is a PhD candidate of philosophy). As intimidating as it sounds, the reader will never be excluded from her wealth of knowledge. Kuang spells out what needs to be known clearly and concisely, and a curious mind will lap up every new theory she presents. It is reminiscent, oddly, of Victor Hugo’s style, particularly in Les Miserablés. I’m not saying Katabasis is like Les Miserablés, nor claiming that if you love one, you’ll love the other. But Hugo is famous for his forays into the economical backgrounds of certain towns, the social backgrounds of certain characters, or the infrastructure of the Paris sewers for an ample number of pages. He presents this information as and when it is necessary, pausing the story for a bit to give the reader some context. This enriches the story, grounds it in reality, and breathes life into the words. Kuang does the same, although her diversions are not nearly as long. This method is consistent over all of her novels, and reader experiences vary, but minds as hungry as Alice’s will delight in it. Kuang leads the story with the contents of Alice’s head and the slightly more elusive contents of her heart, balancing cold facts with the mess of emotions well enough to keep the reader entertained.

Alice is a driven narrator whose brain is constantly whirring and who has many a battle-scar from the trenches of post-graduate education. As is expected of the students in her department, she has no time for pleasures, be that relationships, parties, or eating substantial meals. She and her cohort favour lembas bread (yes, to Lord of the Rings fans, the one you’re thinking of), which sustains them for hours so they can dedicate all their time and energy to their work. Peter commits to his work with equal fervour, however his casual genius and general lack of reliability, as well as the competition for gaining the same professor’s favour, creates a friction between him and Alice which they are forced to face while trekking across the planes of Hell.

The dynamics between the pair is paradoxically one of mutual understanding and lack thereof. They can finish each other’s sentences, discuss theories for hours, follow the other’s train of thought as easily as if it was their own, but it is the secrets they keep that cracks the foundation of what could be an intimate friendship, or even something more. Kuang describes this novel as her first love story, and while it is true that the relationship between Alice and Peter develops over the course of the novel, the reader must not expect romance. This novel is about the intense culture of higher education. It examines the all-consuming high of feeding a hungry mind and the toxicity of committing yourself wholly to one thing, which ultimately ruins oneself. Thus, Alice cracks at the edges, held together by dense bread and logic theorems while descending into literal Hell for the sake of one man.

Professor Grimes is the biggest wedge that drives Alice and Peter apart. His reputation as the best but toughest professor of magick is what draws the pair to him in search of  supervision. Alice tells herself she needs his lack of praise, his impersonal methods, and his ruthless critique in order to become the best at what she does; her ambition drives her, and she thinks that Grimes makes her better. Kuang teases out the darkness lingering beneath Alice’s obstinate nature and exposes the line between sanity and madness that she toes, forcing her to confront the true meaning of life. Alice is haunted by the river that runs through Hell, the river of rebirth and redemption, of new life and new chances, and the temptation of such freedom.

Katabasis is an ambitious novel following two stubborn but passionate characters questing through Hell. Combined with a wondrously complex and intriguing methodology, the end result is something quite unique, and after 560 pages you’ll have a newfound obsession with Hell and a deeper appreciation for pentagrams and fluffy cats. There is a rawness in this novel not seen before in Kuang, who confronts the inevitable pain of living and explores the rejection of physicality in favour of the mind. It’s a hard one to move on from and the reader will linger on it for weeks after finishing.