Katabasis has been the most anticipated release within dark academia fiction in 2025, and honestly it has been one of the most anticipated books of the whole year overall. Unfortunately, R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis completely missed the mark for me, and I might shock you in saying I have DNFed it.

Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own. 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 same conclusion.

Let’s start with my biggest hurdle here. Katabasis is not a dark academia read. It is set in an academic setting and includes a lot of academic jargon, characters with academic perspectives and goals, and includes a lot of citations and references to academics and concepts most people wouldn’t be able to wrap their heads around (myself included, so don’t worry fellow readers). This does not make it a dark academia read. It is an academic fantasy, with scholars traversing Hell to retrieve their supervisor. The idea is fun, the blend of fantasy and academic elements balancing out, though there is a lot of info dumping and tangents that slow down the pacing, but I will get into more of that later. If you are picking up Katabasis thinking it will be like Babel then you are going to be sorely mistaken.

The next obstacle in my way preventing me from enjoying this read is the lack of interest in the characters and plot. I am both a character-driven and plot-driven reader, and while I can get by with one slacking, I can’t continue if both are. Alice and Peter are the main characters, yet I care so little about them and what they are doing. By my standards (so please take this with a hearty grain of salt), they have so little personality that makes them interesting in any way, and their rivalry isn’t fuelled by much at all. I don’t care for their feud or lack thereof, and I don’t care for the feelings and development of their relationship. On top of this, the plot is simultaneously empty and crowded, and rushed and slow-going. What depth there is in some chapters is tarnished by the semi-satirical elitist or sexist commentary from characters or situations. Then there are chapters where they are wandering in search of the next realm and it is repetitive and boring. The pacing is slow and the stakes feel so low, but they are in Hell! How can that be? I reached page 150 and could not continue any further, so perhaps there is a pick up in plot and character depth that I fall short in reaching, but my philosophy is that if I don’t get hooked into the book in the first quarter (give or take) then it is not the book for me.

There is nothing wrong with this being an academic fantasy, nor is there anything wrong with the setting, ideas, concepts, or narrative style overall. Katabasis just isn’t the novel for me. Where I have an issue is in the promotion and pitching for this novel. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in what is or isn’t dark academia fiction, but even comparing this to R.F. Kuang’s evidently dark academic fiction novel Babel you can see clear differences. The tone of Katabasis is lighter, feeling more closely linked to the Emily Wilde books or Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons. Secondly, the social commentary on the themes within the academic setting are not sufficient enough to denote Katabasis as being a dark academia book. Again, it reads like academic fantasy, which is perfectly fine and a great sub-genre of both fantasy and academia books. Anyone who reads Babel and Katabasis would hold the former up as the dark academia book and the latter up as the light academia or academic fantasy novel.

Overall, Katabasis sought to deliver in something I fear it never was going to be, and, as a result, my impression of the book was always going to be unfavourable. I am sure there are readers who will gladly read and enjoy Katabasis, and maybe a few months down the line I will try this again when I am in the mood for an academic fantasy including a sojourn into Hell because the premise is good. For right now, I need to put it down and think things over, namely sticking to library requests for all highly anticipated releases so I don’t feel the financial guilt of buying a book that I didn’t enjoy, and the fact that publishing houses don’t always promote the books to their truest forms.