What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a tortured doctoral candidate. As they journey through the levels of Hell, Peter and Alice will face malevolent deities, skeletal monsters, and impossible-t0-please dissertation committees.
I’ve enjoyed R.F. Kuang’s work in the past and really wanted to like this book, but overall it fell flat for me. The premise is compelling: how on earth could someone be so obsessed with academic achievement that they’d literally go to Hell for it? And Kuang’s vision of Hell as a mirror of academia seems like it would have some worldbuilding potential. It turns out though, that I do not care that much about academia. Maybe it was a failure on the author’s part, or maybe I’m just not the target audience, but I felt that the university/Hell setting got tedious after a while. I also had a hard time relating to the main characters. A lot of their motivations were obscured for most of the book, only to be revealed through flashbacks quite late in the story. While the flashback reveals were interesting, it meant that for the majority of the book, the reader knows very little about what is driving and Alice and Peter, and in turn, has very little incentive to care about them.
The book wasn’t all bad. I really enjoy Kuang’s writing style. The main antagonists of the book, a married team of sorcerers named the Kripkes, are terrifying and fascinating. There’s a side character named Elspeth who I would gladly read a whole book about, and a very good cat named Archimedes who can traverse the boundary between life and death at will. Many of the pieces were there for a really interesting read, the final product just failed to grab me the way I hoped it would.
