‘Katabasis’ isn’t like ‘Yellowface’, but it is what RF Kuang does best

In 2023, RF Kuang became a household name with Yellowface, the biting satire of the publishing industry that had everyone in the book world buzzing, tweeting, subtweeting, and nervously side-eyeing their colleagues. But here’s the thing most casual readers of that novel might not know: Kuang isn’t just a literary provocateur, she’s also a hardcore fantasy writer at heart.

Kuang’s literary career began in 2018 with The Poppy War trilogy, a grimdark epic inspired by 20th-century Chinese history, which fused military fantasy with an unflinching look at colonial violence, war crimes, and the corrosive pull of power. Then came Babel in 2022, a doorstopper set in an alternate 19th-century Oxford, where translation itself became a form of magic, and the university system was revealed as a tool of empire. It was sprawling, intellectual, and devastating.

Yellowface was something of a curveball: a contemporary satire with no magic, no armies, no grimdark battlefields. Instead, it skewered the literary world’s obsession with diversity optics, stolen narratives, and hollow allyship. It was unlike anything we had read by Kuang before, but it was sharp, funny, and excruciatingly timely.

Now, with Katabasis, the author circles back to fantasy. But this isn’t a simple return to form. Instead, here she blends the scathing satire of Yellowface with the mythmaking and magic of her earlier works. The result is something that feels both familiar and new: a campus novel reimagined as a literal descent into hell, where grad students trudge through courts of the underworld in pursuit of their dead supervisor.

The story begins with a catastrophe. Alice Law, a Cambridge doctoral student in analytic magick in the 1980s, has accidentally killed her thesis advisor, the brilliant and sadistic professor Jacob Grimes. His body has exploded in a lab accident, and his soul is stuck waiting for judgement. Without him, Alice’s PhD is doomed. Grimes’s letters, connections, and prestige were her lifeline. So, she chooses the most desperate solution possible: descend into the underworld and drag him back.

Unfortunately for Alice, her rival, Peter Murdoch, insists on coming along. Peter is also one of Grimes’s students, and without his supervisor his future is equally wrecked. The two set off together, reluctantly bound by shared doom. “Hell is a campus,” Kuang writes, and she means it. Their partnership is reluctant and brittle. They despise each other but are bound by the same dependence, the same desperation. Together they trek through the eight courts of hell, each more grotesque than the last, and discover that the real monsters are not demons but the academic systems they have internalised: exploitation disguised as mentorship, rivalry framed as ambition, exhaustion mistaken for prestige.

In myth, katabasis (a descent into the realm of the dead) is always paired with anabasis, the journey back up. Heroes descend to retrieve something precious and, if they return, they return transformed. Kuang leans into this structure but alters it. Katabasis is not about triumphant resurrection. It is about survival. Can you climb out when the ladder is rigged to keep you dangling? In one of the most uncomfortable moments, Alice recalls how Grimes treated her body as little more than raw material for his research. He convinced her that submitting herself to dangerous experiments was proof of her seriousness, even prestige. Alice complies because the alternative—losing his approval—feels worse. Kuang makes it clear that the real poison of academia is how easily students mistake exploitation for mentorship. Unlike Babel, which ended in destruction, Katabasis dwells in the messier, smaller act of staying alive. That makes the novel less about heroic sacrifice and more about endurance, which is both sharper and more unsettling.

Every Kuang novel has its central magical conceit. In Babel it was silver. In Katabasis it is chalk. The choice is almost too fitting. Chalk is the most banal of academic tools, the residue left behind on a professor’s hand after covering a blackboard with formulas. Here, it becomes the stuff of spells, circles, and portals. The chalk in Katabasis is made of the compressed remains of sea creatures, which turns every lecture into a séance of sorts. The rules of chalk magic are left deliberately vague. Like Babel’s silver, it is intuitive but not rigid. Readers are expected to surrender to the conceit rather than demand a manual.

What makes Katabasis stand apart from Kuang’s earlier novels is that beneath the satire and the myth there is also a love story. Not a straightforward romance, but a knot of rivalries, grudges, an unspoken longing and unbearable tension between Alice and Peter. They bicker, they undercut each other, they push each other to the brink, and yet they cannot let go. They keep an inventory of their victories, hurling fellowships, grants, and conference invites at each other as if each accolade cancels out the other’s worth. Their validation is never internal; it always comes from comparison, from the system that pits them against each other.

The competition is as exhausting as it is pointless, but neither can stop. And with this, the novel toys with the line between academic rivalry and something more. Is it unrequited love, is it enemies to lovers, or is it simply two people so bound up in the same system that they mistake obsession for intimacy? Kuang never makes it simple, which is what makes it fascinating. The real romance may not even be between Alice and Peter but between Alice and academia itself. Her devotion to her work is self-destructive, almost masochistic. She is drawn to it even as it consumes her.

Part of why all this feels so cutting is that Kuang writes from inside the machine. Born in 1996, she has degrees in Sinology from Oxford and Cambridge and is pursuing her PhD at Yale. The precarious grind of postgraduate life, the power imbalance between students and supervisors, the constant need for validation from an institution that drains you, are things she has lived.

But here’s the delicious irony: Katabasis may be marketed under “dark academia”, the Tumblr-born aesthetic of gothic libraries, candlelit desks, and tragic genius, but Kuang is essentially dismantling that fantasy. Her Cambridge isn’t romantic; it’s a trap. The novel breaks the very allure that fuels dark academia and our willingness to equate suffering with brilliance and self-destruction with devotion.

Katabasis is not a flawless novel. It leaves a lot to the imagination. It’s dense, packed with mythological allusions, academic in-jokes, and theory references. Some passages feel like seminar tangents you have to reread twice to understand. For readers steeped in classics, philosophy, or literary theory, this is catnip. For others, it may feel overwhelming. But perhaps that’s Kuang’s point: academia is inaccessible by design, and so is this book. To really engage with it, you may need annotations, a Google tab open, and a willingness to get lost.

Readers who already delight in Greek myths, literary theory, and the minutiae of campus life will find Katabasis exhilarating. But even for outsiders, it is a sharp, unsettling meditation on why we willingly submit to institutions that exploit us, and why we mistake survival inside them for triumph.