The Maris Review, vol 72

Maris Kreizman

16 Sep 2025 — 5 min read

And now for two descents into hell...

What I read this week

I feel like critic and reader response alike have been all over the place on this one, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I'm delighted to report that I really enjoyed RF Kuang's latest brick of a fantasy novel. Her vision of the afterworld in Katabasis is something like if Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life was set in academia (without all of the whimsical eating scenes). Maybe I'd call it Defending Your Thesis. Hell is a campus and the entities in charge of determining your fate might be akin to a dissertation committee.

Katabasis a classic descent into hell story with a wicked sense of humor in which fictional texts by the likes of Dante and Virgil and Orpheus are reimagined as textbooks for aspiring magicians. When their brilliant but devious professor Jacob Grimes dies in a horrible accident, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, grad students in Magick at Cambridge, read up on all of the classic works by people who'd gone to hell and survived to write about it before venturing there themselves to rescue their teacher.

The structure of the novel is loose by definition. There are eight courts of hell, and Alice and Peter will explore them. They can find just about anything. What are the rules of hell? What does hell look like and smell like? How do non-dead people survive there? It's all up to Kuang, and she doesn't disappoint in her descriptions. Hell is so incredibly vivid. Kuang's world-building is such that I didn't find the more technical moments off-putting. Even if I couldn't comprehend 100% of the science/math/theory behind the discipline of magick that Alice and Peter practice, I felt confident that the author did, and I appreciate that she could devise a fictional course of study that I could still make sense of even if I never studied logic.

Alice and Peter have a lovely will-they-or-won't-they dynamic, and they have lots of important lessons to learn about what matters in life (and death). It's fun to go on their journey with them. And on the few occasions when I felt it wasn't so fun, I went along with it anyway. Listening to the audiobook version was helpful for this reason – it's okay not to grasp every single detail.

In lieu of writing about a second book this week, I was hoping to get a few things off my mind.

There's always a book angle

“This is not a both-sides problem. One side has a much bigger and [more] malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told. That problem has terrible consequences." This quote may sound like something I've been saying for aeons about book banning, but I didn't say it this time. This time around it was #1 bestselling author JD Vance addressing "left wing extremism" on Charlie Kirk's podcast. Charlie Kirk is a soon-to-be bestselling author, with his new book that will be published by bestselling author Donald Trump's indie publishing imprint in December hovering at the number one spot on Amazon (Kirk's previous books were published by Broadside Books/HarperCollins).

For years we've seen so much handwringing about cancel culture from centrists and increasingly right wing bestselling writers who've argued that "We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences." Well it's time, Harpers letter signers. We are officially in crisis. So where the fuck are you?

Let's recap:

Yesterday Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah was fired for what she had posted online since Charlie Kirk's death, including simply posting a sentence that Kirk once said. Her book about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was canceled by HarperCollins in 2023.

Let's see what the editor of the rightwing book imprint at HarperCollins has to say about that:

Yesterday I also found out that DC Comics had canceled its deal with Gretchen Felker-Martin, one of the best horror writers of our time, for comments about Charlie Kirk she since deleted on Bluesky. Since then she has been the target of death threats and potential doxing. That she is a trans woman is not unrelated, of course.

In related news UC Berkeley, that liberal bastion, provided the Trump administration with a list of 160 names of students, faculty, and staff whom they've accused of alleged antisemitism for speaking out for Palestine. Among them is Judith Butler, the Jewish author of seminal books like Gender Trouble, who had the nerve to criticize Israel. “Most Jews are against genocide," they told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, "and we were taught to be against genocide, and we were taught, as well, that 'never again' is a slogan that should apply to all people.”

I have been watching how swiftly the right has taken action to silence dissent.

Meanwhile:

Brian Kilmeade, bestselling author of ten books published by Sentinel/Penguin Random House, said on live television that mentally ill homeless people should be killed by “involuntary lethal injection.” What were the consequences of his action? He had to issue a rather insincere-seeming apology. PRH issued no comment.

PRH has its own problems, I suppose. Yesterday Trump filed a law suit against both the New York Times and Penguin Random House for defamation and libel. I guess he really didn't like this book. He's asking for damages of at least $15 billion. It's an absurd suit all around, but I'm still scared to death. It's a terrifying time for people like me who have been insisting that the right has more of a vested interest in demolishing free speech than the left for a decade now. I'll be looking to the people who believe in something, who stand for something, who don't fold under pressure. I hope that's you and me.