Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

My second R.F. Kuang book, and another miss for me, unfortunately. I listened to it as an audiobook while running.

The plot of this book sounds thrilling: two Cambridge grad students journey to hell to resurrect their supervisor. This description reminded me of Hell Bent (Leigh Bardugo) and Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), both of which I loved. I had high hopes.

It did not live up to those hopes. I felt that the setting was… unfinished? Useless? The 7 or 9 courts of hell or whatever were just so under-wrought and purposeless. The book was really about Alice and Peter (the MCs) overcoming the trauma of a terribly abusive mentor, and Hell served more as a convenient setting and source of distractions/macguffins to lengthen the book.

There was a point where I was listening where I realized the switcheroo from hero’s journey -> character study had happened—probably during one of the 100 flashbacks to their professor being a huge dick—and was still absorbed in the book. I don’t mind that the book was not what I was expecting, but ultimately even the True Plot was just too obvious and overdone for me to enjoy.

To give the book some credit: the magic system in the book was novel to me. An admirable quality, given the genres I am predisposed to reading. Casting spells by exploiting logical space in paradoxes allowed the author to bring in a lot of math/logic/history into her writing, which kept me interested in the setting, despite my previous complaints. I also felt like Kuang did a great job on the actual prose.

A case of good writing with bad (reanimated dog) bones.