Katabasis is a dark academia fantasy book, in which two students travel to hell, what more could you want?
Quick Info
- Title: Katabasis
- Author: R.F. Kuang
- Publish Date: 26th August 2025
- Genre: Fantasy
- Sub-Genre: Dark Academia
- What to Expect:
- Hell as a campus
- A lot of academic talk
- A cute but cheeky cat
- Slow burn romance
- A unique magic system
– Rating: 5 stars –
Trigger Warnings
Death, suicide, animal death, sexual harassment, sexual assault, child death, eating disorder
If I have missed any out or you feel like something should be added, please leave a comment.
Synopsis
Alice Law wants to become the brightest mind in analytical magic but she needs her professor to graduate – unfortunately he’s dead and in hell. She teams up with her rival Peter Murdoch to go and find him. But hell is not like what the philosophers said, the rules are upside down and if they are going to survive Peter and Alice are going to have to work together.
My Thoughts
This was amazing and I loved it. The magic system was unique, the romance was great, the dark academia vibes were strong.
The magic system is powered via paradoxes which the magicians can exploit. I loved this because there was a true barrier to entry for magic. You must know the paradoxes and how to exploit them in order to perform magic. This did make certain parts of this very wordy and a bit confusing (I’ll touch on this more later) but it was a cool system and made the relationship between Alice and Peter interesting. They are experts at different parts of magic, Alice being language, Peter being logic/maths. It really works, for both the plot, characters and romance. Hell itself is really well written, I like how we don’t really know how it works, it’s constantly shifting and changing. There are different deities, it’s not solely Christian, which I enjoyed a lot.
The romance was very sweet and quite tame. I don’t generally like romance but this was very good. I do like enemies to lovers and this was great because they are rivals. There is no spice at all, which makes sense since they’re in hell. I think the characters are very good aside from this. Alice and Peter are both unlikable at first, but the journey they go on is satisfying and deserved.
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