Review: Katabasis

This is going to be a boring review. I listened to this audiobook, got to the end, found it so utterly unsatisfactory that it deleted itself from my memory.

That’s Katabasis for you.

Let’s begin: I have a soft spot for Hell. I read the Cliffs Notes for Dante’s Inferno when I was 10, then the actual work many times since I was mid-teens. Orpheus, Hades Town, you name it–I like people’s takes on Damnation.

On the whole, I find it much more reasonable than Heaven. Heaven seems boring. I’m sure I’ll come to regret those words someday.

In any case…Katabasis.

Further on the “Harold with a mayfly brain”–I have no memory of anyone recommending this book to me. It just showed-up on my Wishlist on Audible, likely from a NPR Fresh Air book recommendation. I consumed it over about a week, and it went through the full arc of (1) Neat Premise, (2) Obvious middle, (3) What’s even happening, to (4) Oh right, there needs to be an ending.

Neat Premise

In the novel, we open on the protagonist and narrator, American magical prodigy Alice Law, preparing to jump from a pentagram drawn on the floor of a room at Cambridge University to Hell/Hades to retrieve her Magick Studies Professor so he can approver her Doctoral status in magic. Just as she’s about to start the incantation, Peter Murdoch, her rival and “Golden Boy” student bursts in and insists on coming with.

The price to go to hell? Just half your remaining lifespan, assuming you ever get back out in the first place.

Oh well. They’re 22 and figure 30 years of their remaining lifespan is fine. They decide to make a soiree of it, and go together.

Obvious middle

Once in Hell, they enter the first canto, Limbo and it’s not so bad. They encounter some familiar characters the way Dante would’ve. Various “levels” match Dante’s experience: Lust, Greed, Wrath, etc. Some have some novel representations and inhabitants.

For those who’ve read Dante, it’s interesting but not as zesty.

What’s even happening?

So where things veer is when the main internal and external conflicts are introduced. Initially the rivalry between Peter and Eve takes the stage, but then an “evil” set of magicians in hell becomes the boogeyman, the “Terminator”-style pursuers that hound our protagonists.

Things really fall off the wheels, and honestly I wonder if the author is trying to make us feel what it’s like to be listless in Hell itself. Because I just about put the book down.

Oh right, an ending

So Eve reaches the city of hell, Dis, gets tempted, breaks free, meets umm…Satan, I guess? It’s rushed, narrative threads get tied up.

Summary Review

Overall, Katabasis is like alot of Fantasy/Sci Fi I’ve been reading lately. It sets-up a terrific premise, and then the characters just don’t feel real. The book spends hours of en medias res flashbacks explaining just WHY two super-bright magicians are obsessed with going to Hell to retrieve a guy they both hate.

Ultimately it rings hollow and I wish I had the hours I spent listening back. There are some novel ideas here but they don’t go anywhere for me. I can’t recommend Katabasis, at all.