Katabasis

Katabasis (2025) is a standalone fantasy novel by R.F. Kuang. It is her sixth novel, following Yellowface, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence, and The Poppy War trilogy. While a novel like Yellowface examines how issues of race, class, and gender factor into the publishing world, Katabasis sets these issues within the world of academia. It follows magick students Alice Law and Peter Murdoch as they venture into Hell to retrieve the soul of their deceased advisor. It explores Academia as an Infernal Structure, Ambition as Self-Damnation, and The Mutability of Facts, Reason, and Logic. 

Kuang was born in Guangzhou, China, but immigrated to the United States as a young child. She has a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees, and as of 2025 was completing a PhD at Yale University in East Asian Language and Literature. Katabasis debuted at #1 on The New York Times Bestseller list.

This guide uses the 2025 Harper Voyager hardback.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of gender discrimination, sexual violence and sexual harassment, sexual content, ableism, mental illness, disordered eating, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, substance use, graphic violence, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Cambridge Magick student Alice Law blames herself for the death of Professor Jacob Grimes. He died when a chalk pentagram she didn’t double-check failed. Since Alice needs Grimes’s recommendation letter, she goes to Hell to retrieve his soul. Her rival, Peter Murdoch, travels with her.

Hell’s appearance adapts to who is perceiving it. For Alice and Peter, it looks like a university. Even Archimedes, their living department cat, wanders in and out of their journey. In Asphodel, they meet undergraduates who died in an accident under Grimes’s tutelage. They say Grimes has already moved on. Alice and Peter climb a wall into Pride, the First Court. Alice thinks about how life isn’t worth living if she doesn’t get a tenured job, and how people have continuously warned her about Grimes’s conduct. Pride looks like a library, where Shades research an answer to a prompt about how “good” is defined. A Shade named Moore guides them around. Though there is nothing forcibly keeping Shades there, he grows angry when Alice and Peter propose that they walk to the next Court. Alice has to distract him so they can escape.

On the banks of the Lethe, the river of forgetting, Alice is tempted by the deity Old Lady Meng Po to enter. She and Peter realize they can’t use chalk to cast magick in Hell. The Second Court, Desire, is a student center. Behind individual doors, Shades repeat lustful acts. Alice has fragmented flashbacks of abusive experiences with Grimes. After they leave the building, they’re attacked by bone-things, reincarnated skeletons made of bone and chalk. Alice fights them with Lethe’s water.

Peter is worried when Alice gets some on herself. Alice tells him she can’t forget anything. Grimes used her as a human experiment to create a pentagram scar. Peter tells her stories about unethical things Grimes compelled him to do with his influence. When Peter sleeps while Alice stays on watch, she looks at his notebook. There is a pentagram for an organic exchange, and she thinks he is going to exchange her for Grimes. She thinks about how charming Peter was when they met, but how he’d continuously miss plans he made with people, meaning she never got to know him well.

They enter Greed; Alice thinks about how Grimes put her and Peter in competition and how she once heard Peter spread rumors that she was romantic with Grimes. They meet a deity called Weaver Girl, who gives them a test of loyalty. Alice betrays Peter when traumatic memories overwhelm her. They’re attacked by bone-things and are narrowly saved by a Shade named Elspeth. Alice recognizes her as a former student of Grimes’s who died by suicide. Elspeth explains that the bone-things are made by the Kripkes, American magicians who were maligned by the academy for their commercial appeal. They engaged in a desperate feat where the couple killed one another and their son, so they could go to Hell and find a way back. They’ve been drinking Lethe and losing their humanity. Elspeth teaches Alice and Peter that pentagrams in Hell have to be drawn by blood, so the Kripkes have been killing any living magician who ventures into Hell. The Kripkes are looking for a Dialetheia, or a True Contradiction, that they can use to barter with Lord Yama for their lives. Elspeth has decided she wants to live and is also looking.

The next day, Elspeth tells Alice about the self-torturer paradox, which describes how someone can make a series of individual choices that seem logical, but still lead to a painful outcome. She compares this to academia to explain why she decided to die. Though Alice recognizes parts of herself in Elspeth, she is also desperate to prove she is different. Privately, Alice convinces Peter to betray Elspeth to find the Dialetheia themselves. They sail past Greed and into Wrath. When Elspeth is on shore, Peter draws a pentagram to trap her. When Alice lures her to the pentagram, Elspeth reverses it and finds out they want to betray her to save Grimes. Furious that they want to resurrect the man who abused them, she explodes into butterflies and banishes them to shore.

Peter regrets betraying Elspeth and is mad that Alice influenced him. They get caught in an Escher trap set by the Kripkes. With no hope of escape, they weaken. Alice tells Peter about how Grimes sexually abused her. Though Alice felt romantic feelings toward Grimes, he manipulated her into watching him have sex with someone in the lab, and then later tried to have sex with Alice. Peter saw Grimes trying to kiss Alice and came to an incorrect conclusion. After Alice refused Grimes, she faced immediate professional repercussions. Alice began to have suicidal ideation and her health declined, leading to the mistake that killed Grimes. She tells Peter that she never planned to bring Grimes back: She was going to bind his soul to his dug-up remains and exercise her power over him.

Peter then tells his own story about why he thinks he is responsible for Grimes’s death. He has Crohn’s disease, which has periodically disabled him since childhood. At Oxford, people assumed his long absences were because he was an erratic genius. Rather than correcting them, he let them assume this, including Alice. One day, he had a severe flare-up and had to tell Grimes, who did not understand. Peter decided not to seek treatment and declined rapidly, undergoing an emergency colectomy. While he was in the hospital, Grimes stole and published his research. He then forced Peter to do proofs for his stolen work, which Peter did sloppily, leading to the mistake that killed Grimes. They aren’t sure if Alice copied Peter’s mistake without realizing or purposefully transcribed it.

Peter has an idea to escape, but it only works on one person. He uses it on Alice, though she wants to leave together or not at all. She hides when the Kripkes arrive, but hears them kill Peter. Distraught, she proceeds to the final Court. A Shade named Gradus leads her to Dis, where Shades write dissertations about their crimes in hopes they will be allowed to reincarnate. He takes her through a bazaar and a writing workshop, where she meets another Shade called Gertrude. Neither Gradus nor Gertrude thinks the dissertations will lead to reincarnation. Gertrude takes Alice to the Rebel Citadel, where Shades have stood and pondered so long they turn into gnarled trees and sometimes throw themselves into the Lethe. Horrified by the way they’ve given up, Alice flees.

Outside the city, a leopard stalks Alice until they get caught in the Kripkes’ trap. Hanging knives kill the leopard, but Alice escapes and is again found by Gradus. Unlike Gertrude, Gradus thinks there is some way out of Hell, and all he is certain of is his own uncertainty. He coaches Alice on how to fight the Kripkes. She makes weapons and armor out of the leopard’s bones and enhances her senses by snorting chalk.

She prepares traps for the Kripkes: Nick, Magnolia, and their son Theophrastus. Alice fights Magnolia and Theophrastus and traps them. Alice fights Nick with the spell she intended for Grimes. She binds his soul to Grimes’s remains in the world above, while pushing him into the Lethe below. Nick loses memories and deteriorates. Magnolia gathers Theophrastus and walks into the Lethe, also deteriorating. Alice, hurt from her fall into the river, watches. Gradus arrives to congratulate her. A boat and a white-robed figure arrive for Gradus, who joins them and drinks the distilled Lethe that leads to reincarnation. Alice watches him transform into a new spirit full of potential. Lethe destroys the pentagram scar.

Elspeth arrives and takes Alice back on her boat. Alice confesses what happened with Peter. Elspeth says she’s already found the Dialetheia. She wants Alice to have it to barter with, as Elspeth has decided to reincarnate. They sail to Lord Yama’s court. Alice kisses Elspeth before ascending to Lord Yama’s throne.

Yama summons Grimes, who berates Yama and then praises Alice for finding him. When he expresses no sorrow over Peter’s death, Alice casts the organic exchange spell she found in Peter’s notebook, with Lord Yama’s permission and assistance. She realizes Grimes is an ordinary, petty man, not the near-deity she once believed him to be. She exchanges Grimes for Peter.

She and Peter barter with Yama. He agrees to let them ascend again and gives them back half the years they sacrificed to descend in the first place. On their way out of Hell, Alice thinks back to her journey while also appreciating the small, material joys she’ll experience in the world above. She is no longer bound by the expectations of academia but looks forward to her future with Peter.