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psocopteraKatabasis, RF Kuang, 2025 fantasy novel about magic grad school and Hell. I was really into this at the start and then at some point in the middle it started to lose me and never quite got me back. If you are looking for 2025 adult fantasy takes on the magic school trope I would recommend The Incandescent over this one, although this one might land better if you're particularly a Dante fan, I couldn't say. (I know only the basics and have never read it.) Heads up for animal harm, child harm, and suicidality.
A bunch more behind the cut, discussing my three (maybe three and a half) problems with the book.
Problem one: meh, whatever. One of the things I liked about Babel (and appreciated in the Poppy War books as well but Babel is a much closer comparison for this novel) was that it was genuinely challenging, like, there was a real moral question around violence/terrorism there. "Life is worth living" and "I won't look any further than my own backyard because if it isn't there I never really lost it to begin with" are fine, classic themes but they're not exactly surprising or difficult, and I wasn't particularly emotionally moved by this presentation of them. I think I was hoping it would have something more to *say*.
Two: I just did not care, ever, about Peter Murdoch. I can't say that I've *never* bought the whole Schroedinger's Asshole thing, where it turns out the guy (almost always a guy) who has been a jerk has a tragic backstory, or is possessed by a demon, or absolutely does not want to disclose his disability, and now he's Sympathetic TM, but I sure wasn't feeling it here. Maybe it is true that we can never know what anyone else is going through and people who seem thoughtless or inconsiderate might have reasons where from their POV they were doing the best they could, but it doesn't follow, for me, that I then have to find them likeable as the protagonist's love interest. I thought it was reasonable for Alice to believe, based on available evidence, that he would sacrifice her, and unreasonable for Peter to expect that she would just somehow know better despite him working very deliberately to make sure he wasn't known, and the only way their "romance" worked for me at all was to assume that Alice would have ended up trauma-bonded with *any* other living human with her in Hell. (Or maybe even not living... consider the much more interesting alternate ending where Alice brings back Elspeth rather than Peter...) I also think there's something slightly self-undermining about "character doesn't want to be pitied, and so behaves like a jerk, but then the author asks us to pity him to excuse the jerkiness", like, hmm.
Three: why is this book set in the 1980s?? If part of the point is to be a scathing critique of grad school, abusive advisors, sexism, academic pretentiousness, etc, why not critique those things as they manifest *now* instead of setting it in a past generation where it's easy to dismiss it all as "oh sure I bet all that was bad back then"? It didn't seem obviously like a plot you couldn't do at all in an era of cellphones/the Internet/Brexit/covid/whatever, nor did it seem like Kuang had some particular interest in that particular historical moment as such.
And a half: the plot didn't quite hang together for me - Alice tells herself, and us, that she wants to bring him back because she needs her advisor, but he couldn't have actually done that as the Erichtho summons, so she was just bringing him back to torture him, but it was him influencing her from Hell to be thinking about it? I would have forgiven this if I'd been more excited about the book otherwise - probably never would have thought about it twice. And I suppose it's sort of appropriate for a book about contradictions to feel like it's standing on one. So I guess I wouldn't really call it a problem, but it wasn't particularly satisfying plotting either.
A bunch more behind the cut, discussing my three (maybe three and a half) problems with the book.
Problem one: meh, whatever. One of the things I liked about Babel (and appreciated in the Poppy War books as well but Babel is a much closer comparison for this novel) was that it was genuinely challenging, like, there was a real moral question around violence/terrorism there. "Life is worth living" and "I won't look any further than my own backyard because if it isn't there I never really lost it to begin with" are fine, classic themes but they're not exactly surprising or difficult, and I wasn't particularly emotionally moved by this presentation of them. I think I was hoping it would have something more to *say*.
Two: I just did not care, ever, about Peter Murdoch. I can't say that I've *never* bought the whole Schroedinger's Asshole thing, where it turns out the guy (almost always a guy) who has been a jerk has a tragic backstory, or is possessed by a demon, or absolutely does not want to disclose his disability, and now he's Sympathetic TM, but I sure wasn't feeling it here. Maybe it is true that we can never know what anyone else is going through and people who seem thoughtless or inconsiderate might have reasons where from their POV they were doing the best they could, but it doesn't follow, for me, that I then have to find them likeable as the protagonist's love interest. I thought it was reasonable for Alice to believe, based on available evidence, that he would sacrifice her, and unreasonable for Peter to expect that she would just somehow know better despite him working very deliberately to make sure he wasn't known, and the only way their "romance" worked for me at all was to assume that Alice would have ended up trauma-bonded with *any* other living human with her in Hell. (Or maybe even not living... consider the much more interesting alternate ending where Alice brings back Elspeth rather than Peter...) I also think there's something slightly self-undermining about "character doesn't want to be pitied, and so behaves like a jerk, but then the author asks us to pity him to excuse the jerkiness", like, hmm.
Three: why is this book set in the 1980s?? If part of the point is to be a scathing critique of grad school, abusive advisors, sexism, academic pretentiousness, etc, why not critique those things as they manifest *now* instead of setting it in a past generation where it's easy to dismiss it all as "oh sure I bet all that was bad back then"? It didn't seem obviously like a plot you couldn't do at all in an era of cellphones/the Internet/Brexit/covid/whatever, nor did it seem like Kuang had some particular interest in that particular historical moment as such.
And a half: the plot didn't quite hang together for me - Alice tells herself, and us, that she wants to bring him back because she needs her advisor, but he couldn't have actually done that as the Erichtho summons, so she was just bringing him back to torture him, but it was him influencing her from Hell to be thinking about it? I would have forgiven this if I'd been more excited about the book otherwise - probably never would have thought about it twice. And I suppose it's sort of appropriate for a book about contradictions to feel like it's standing on one. So I guess I wouldn't really call it a problem, but it wasn't particularly satisfying plotting either.
