Katabasis Part 1 - R F Kuang - Dark Fantasy Book - Dark Academia Book

The quest: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. The result: We went ot hell and back! Dive into Katabasis by R.F. Kuang with our full-spoiler book club breakdown! Two rival PhD students descend into a hellish university campus to retrieve their abusive advisor’s soul—facing academic trials, betrayal, and dark revelations. Is this dark academia masterpiece a 7/10 triumph or a pacing misfire? We debate character arcs, logic paradoxes, and that wild revenge twist.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Epic Plot Summary Full Spoilers!
06:04 – Descent Begins: Chapters 1-6
31:41 – Chapters 7-11: Desire, Trauma & Lethe River
44:55 – Chapters 12-18: Greed, Wrath & Betrayal
58:05 – Chapters 20-35: Peter’s Sacrifice, City of Dis & Final Showdown

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jonathan

Host

Slava

What is The Side Quest Book Club Podcast?

If you’re a reader looking for something deeper or an indie author working on your book, The Side Quest Book Club is for you. We skip the usual book reviews and ratings. Each episode turns fun side quests into real lessons, so you’ll leave not just entertained, but with a better understanding of why storytelling matters.

The novel, Potavasis, follows two rival PhD students, Alice Law and Peter Murdock, who are so desperate for a letter of recommendation from their recently departed thesis advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, that they choose to descend into hell to retrieve the soul. Grimes died in a magical accident that Alice believes is her fault. Hell appears to them as a university campus.

As Alice and Peter traverse the eight courts of hell, they face various trials that mirror academic pressures and are forced to confront the fraught rivalry between them. They uncover the truth about Grimes' manipulative cruelty, including emotional and sexual abuse. Realizing he pitted them against each other, Peter sacrifices his life for Alice to escape a trap.

Alice continues alone to the final court, eventually realizing Grimes is a weak, ordinary man. But for us, we're descending into hell with Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. And we're going to have two lovely ladies join us back as guests.

You know both of them. Neither of them is a new guest. We're going to have Jess back on with her wild opinions, and we're going to have Abby back on as someone who actually has read a lot of R.F. Kuang's books, and she'll be coming in as our resident expert.

So, can't wait to have them on, but I'm going to start off with a quick bio about the author herself. Rebecca F. Kuang is the number one New York Times and number one Sunday Times best-selling author of Poppy War, the trilogy, Babel in Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards.

She was named to the 2023 Time 100 Next List and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

She's very well educated. Crazy. Where she researches Sinophone Literature and Asian American Literature.

I'm actually going to have to look up what Sinophone Literature is because I knew the rest of the stuff. But what is the MSc? Masters in Science? Science. It's a Masters in Science.

It's often associated with STEM, I think. Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay.

Don't quote me on that, but an MSc is a Master of Science. An MSc, I think, might be just something that's very specialized. So, Computer Science, maybe? Alright.

Well, that is our author. RF Kuang pulls no punches in terms of writing academia and easily referencing, it sounds like, her alma mater here and lets us know what it's like to live amongst the pressures of being a grad student in those places. Now, Slava and I have some hot takes in terms of character development for this book in particular, but we'll get into that shortly.

I did do a quick search here. Sinophone Literature refers to literary works written in Chinese or by Chinese-speaking authors outside of mainland China. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, which is, I mean, you and I would not normally know that, right? Like, barring research. Yeah. Sino is Chinese and phone is speaking or writing in a particular language.

So, Sinophone is Chinese-speaking, apparently. Alright. Language specifically, not nationality.

So, if you spoke Chinese and then wrote Chinese literature because you're a Chinese speaker outside of mainland China, you could be writing Sinophone Literature. Okay. So, fun little facts there about a new literature type that I didn't know about.

If you knew about it in the audience, drop it in the comments. Also, on this line, what other very unique genres of literature do you know about that most people don't? I want to know about those. So, put them in the comments for me.

Slava, can you lead us down into the descent of Katabasis? I certainly can. So, we're going to do a quick plot summary here and full spoilers ahead. Because we're covering the whole book in one episode, it is going to be the whole plot given to you.

So, here we go. The novel Katabasis, just a quick warning, full spoilers ahead. Because we're covering the whole book in one episode, I'm going to give the major plot points and some of them are going to be spoilers.

The novel Katabasis follows two rival PhD students, Alice Law and Peter Murdock, who are so desperate for a letter of recommendation from their recently departed thesis advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, that they choose to descend into hell to retrieve his soul. Of note, Grimes died in a magical accident that Alice believes was her fault. Hell appears to them as a university campus, can relate, which reflects the theme of academia as an infernal structure.

As Alice and Peter traverse the eight courts of hell, they face various trials that mirror academic pressures and are forced to confront the fraught rivalry between them. They uncover the truth about Grimes' manipulative cruelty, including emotional and sexual abuse, realizing he pitted them against each other. Peter sacrifices his life for Alice to escape a trap set by the antagonistic magicians called the Kripe Keys.

Alice continues alone to the final court, eventually realizing Grimes is a weak, ordinary man. She confronts Lord Yama, the king of the underworld, and uses a true chronicled addiction, dilithia, to exchange Grimes' soul for Peter's return. The pair secures the return of half their sacrificed lifespans and ascends back to the surface, free from the toxic ambitions of academia.

That's a pretty good summary of what we read. It is. Cutting to the chase, what is your response when Lord Yama's like, yeah, I'll let you go back, but I'm going to take half your lifespan? Well, he only took a quarter of their lifespan.

They gave up half of their lifespan to go to hell, and he gives half of that back to them. But I think that's fine. I, believable, I accept it.

He was even generous. The fact to go to hell, you have to give something up to traverse it as a person who's alive makes sense to me. The fact that Yama is generous, if you want to call him that, and says, all right, you still have to pay a price, but because of all you endured, I'm giving you half of your payment back.

So they only took off a quarter of their life in the end. That seems pretty good. And if they're grad students, they're probably mid to late 20s, you think? Mid to late 20s if they went from school to school to school, yep.

Yeah, yeah, straight back to back to back. So if he took a quarter of their life, they're going to die. Let's say they lived, average person, what, lives to 100, right, give or take? I would say 80, but sure, 100.

If you're going to call it, if it's 80, then they've got 30 years left, maybe. Yeah, yeah. So, man, do they really want to dedicate all their time to school? I don't know.

Not after that. Not, yeah, not after that, man. Yeah.

But when we got into this book, you and I both said, man, I really like the concept. I like the idea of it, right? Yeah. I like the potential it has, but we also brought up the fact that the main character, Alice, she feels as though, when I'm experiencing what she's experiencing, it seems as though she's actually like a homeschooler who's hit college for the first time, like undergrad, not grad school, right? Yeah.

And the reason that you and I talked about, and you can expand on this here in a second for me, is some of the stuff she comments on, like the homeschool part feels very normal. But who gets to grad school and doesn't have some understanding of how the world works in terms of course joking and romance, even if you've never had romance yourself of some kind, at least watching a Disney Channel movie or a romantic comedy or something, right? Yeah. Because there is some sort of modernity in the book, unless I've totally missed it.

It seemed like it was more modern. No, you haven't missed it. One of the critiques that I watched, and I'll preface what I'm about to say in response to you is, I found two content creators similar to us who have YouTube channels.

One of them, she loved the book. She thought it was great. One of them, she hated the book.

And then I found a Guardian review and an NPR review and a couple of other blogs. And I specifically searched for very positive and somewhat to very negative reviews of the book. And I'm going to get into that in a second, but the specific response to you is the time period.

One of the people who had a negative review of the book, she said that I couldn't figure out what was anachronistic because it seemed out of place. So I judged it as anachronistic. I couldn't tell what time period this is.

And that alone, you know, when I heard that, I was like, oh yeah, that's right. But my initial critique of Alice and Peter was they both seemed, like you said, like the homeschoolers seeing the world for the first time. And the thing that cemented that notion and stayed with me to the end of the book is when they sleep next to each other for warmth and he wakes up with a morning erection and they both react to it like teenagers.

And I get it. They have a history and I get it. The grimes play to their mind.

All that fair. Yep. That's what happens.

But they don't respond to it as adults. And the fact that it's even there, I'm not necessarily judging Kwong for putting in there as you're writing an idea comes to you. It's a way to add tension and a little bit of awkwardness there.

Great. But the way they deal with it does not fit their age. And the fact that they're professionals now, they're in grad school, they're doing this science, which magic in this world is akin to science or adjacent to science.

It just didn't seem believable to me. Right. So I'm going to give a quick summary of the positive reviews.

And like I said, four or five positive reviews, four or five negative reviews. I combined what I read and watched into both. So we'll start with the positive reviews.

The positive reception of Cut Abysses underscores its quality as ambitious, smoothly told, deftly written. This is, you know, some of it's my word, some it's direct quotes with superb pacing. Reviewers who think this is a great book celebrates the narrative's scathing critique and biting humor.

I kind of agree with them. And that it effectively skewers the hypocritical, the insular and high pressure environment of prestige academia. The prose for people who love this is described as flowing easily with snappy dialogue, woody narration.

Those who love the novel do so for it finding the perfect balance between goofy and playful and campy, while simultaneously being deep, smart, well-researched and innovative. Intellectually, they say, the book provides deep level of academic commentary and feeling like the world's most philosophical tongue in cheek Easter egg hunt, according to one. Furthermore, Alice's Central Journey received praise for all the positive reviews as really good character work.

One even said some of the best character work in recent history. It provides compelling and realistic protagonist and reviewers here found the overall experience, again, quotes from the reviews there. It's fun, it's engaging and it culminates in a satisfying ending focused on the strength of survival.

So that is a synopsis of all the positive reviews. And one of the positive reviews from the content creator, she even went into it saying, I am biased. I love RF Kwan.

I get that there's critiques. Here's my response to those critiques. Now, those who found this book to be a bad piece of literature, here's where their main gripes with it is.

So the critique of Katabasis, see I'm even mispronouncing it. That's why I was just like Katabasis, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, everybody knows it's one of those things where we're not lecturing on Greek literature or Greek grammar, so I'm not going to get spun up about this.

But those reviews centered on what they saw as significant flaws, major editorial and structural issues. Reviewers argued the pacing was glacial and often suffered from repetition and lengthy, distracting philosophical asides that brought the narrative to, quote from one reviewer, a grinding halt. This stagnation resulted in a lack of urgency and what you mentioned to me in the text, zero stake, zero stakes, excuse me.

As the hell depicted was deemed not dangerous. I saw that. That was something that bothered me.

And the physical threats dissipated easily. Character development was heavily criticized by a lot of people. Well, a lot of people, the four I read.

Character development was heavily criticized. The four you read plus you and me. Right, right, right.

So the protagonists were often described as deeply unlikable. One reviewer specifically said, I cannot stand Alice. She's greedy.

She's immature. And her arc is not earned. And exhibiting zero growth or change.

Okay. And another one said their arcs for Peter and Alice into narrative dots, not into narrative. They felt like narrative dots.

The promoted academic rivals to lovers dynamic was largely non-existent, which I kind of disagree with, but it probably poorly executed, you know, literally. And they lacked romantic tension, which again, I also disagree with the negative reviewers on this. There was plenty of tension, but it was executed poorly.

It was too awkward for two grown people. Yeah, it was just childish. You and I literally both said that if this was set not in grad school, but in undergrad, fine.

Would have believed it, right? Like, hey, they were homeschooled. They got into Oxford for the first time. Like, they don't know what's going on.

They're kind of like unsure in their own skin. Yeah, honestly, more believable. Sorry, continue.

No, it's fine. So furthermore, the novel drew negative attention for its lack of internal consistency. That's like the people that see it as a bad book, why they say it's a bad book.

One of the things that repeats in these reviews is there's no internal consistency. Some said the jarring quick and quippy or quirky and quippy tone takes away from the seriousness of what it tries to accomplish. A lot of people said there were the starvation disordered eating thing was too poorly executed because it seemed to them that it was glorifying it.

I don't agree with that. But ultimately, it was thought as lazy in its imagination. That's how kind of I would put everything together into one sentence.

Slava reads all the stuff, all the critiques, and it seemed lazy. And it seemed lazy on two fronts, the editorial front, because a lot of repetition of stuff. And sometimes there would be Grimes' death explained or alluded to and then alluded to again.

In one of the reviews that I saw, and they said, like, you said Grimes is dead and Alice thinks she killed him twice in one paragraph. Why are you doing this? So lazy in editorial and lazy in imagination. Those are negative reviews.

You're really committed to trying to say this correctly. I really am. I applaud you.

Thank you. You're not intellectual enough for it. So I'm going to help the audience out here.

Just, you know, of course. Let's do this. How would you say katabasis in Russian? In Russian? With a Russian pronunciation? Let me try to think.

Katabasis. I don't know. I think Russian, because it's on that side of the globe, they would probably try to pronounce it in what academics today think Greek sounded like.

So, yeah. Katabasis. That's how they would say it.

Katabasis. All right. Stick with that one.

Sure. All right. Yeah.

So what do you guys think? Drop some notes in the comments. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Have you read her before? Right. Is this her best work? I don't know.

I want to take a quick interlude before we dive into more of the plot here. And just one thing I really want to praise her on is the sheer attention to detail here in this hardcover book. Slava, do you remember what it's called to color the outsides of the pages? I do not.

But it's beautiful. Like shiny gold on the front of the cover. This was great.

I love this. Like if I saw this in the shop, I would just buy this because like very cool. A lot of attention to detail on all of it, where it's like these spirits and they're kind of waves and then a sort of heaven and hell type thing here with skulls and fire.

And it goes from fire on this side, as you can see the detail, to water and like heaven on this side. It's very beautiful. It's sort of like a book can be.

And then inside there's like similarly nice and themed illustrations here and there, which I don't have these bookmarked, but on the covers. Yeah. There's also illustrations in the pages too, where they're talking about the circles of hell, whether it's a coral, whether it's this shape or the other shape, there are illustrations to help you understand what Alice and Peter are ranting about.

Yeah, this is Peter's map. Yep. Try and... I'll just hold it there for a couple seconds.

You can kind of get a look at it. Yeah, there it is. And there's a couple other... Alice's map as a comparison.

Oh, yeah. But I love when authors take the time to... Here's Elspeth's map. Yeah.

To take the time and like give us these illustrations, because you can explain it, but it's something else when you actually show me a picture of what you meant to try to describe as well. Agreed. So, all right.

Shall we? Let's do it. Continue our descent? Let's descend. So, since this is one episode for the whole book, I'm just going to hit the highlights of the chapters, and maybe this first section will be chapters one through six or so, but I'll hit some of the main points from the summary here.

I won't be reading everything like we normally do, and then we'll just go back and forth and talk about it. So, ever since the untimely death of magic student Alice's Law dissertation advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, Cambridge University, she has been researching how to venture back into hell to retrieve him from Lord Yama, the Lord of the Underworld. So, she draws a Hurt Chalk inscription, but is interrupted by her rival, Peter Murdoch.

He's naturally gifted at magic, well versed in the machinations of the academic institution, and can tell from her inscription where she is going. He alters her inscription so it can transport both of them, and they go to hell. Alice blames herself for Grimes's death.

He delegated double-checking his pentagrams to his graduate students, or worked exploited and exhausted. She failed to close the loop and caused his body to break apart when he cast the spell, so he exploded. And now, she doesn't have an advisor, and because Alice is so singularly focused into getting into magic, and she's so obsessed with academic purity and rigor, she wants him to be her advisor.

Nobody else will do, because he's the best at what he does, so she's going back to hell, Peter in tow, to get Grimes's back. Chapter two, they're in hell, and like I said, it seems like a reverse image of Cambridge's graduate lab. And it's not the hell that you imagine from any movies or books or your own imagination, or what Hollywood and the common parlance has taught us, right? It's completely different.

And they meet a cat named Archimedes. Archimedes, there you go, yeah, Archimedes, yep. Archimedes, yes.

So, they, in chapter three, we find them trying to reach the top of a wall, and this is where their shared history is revealed, that they might have been lovers, or at least flirted before, they liked each other, and what I mentioned earlier in our intro, they sleep next to each other for warmth. He wakes up with a morning erection, he gets all, like, out of his mind about it, and she's awkward, but she's trying to calm him down, he's just apologizing profusely, whatever that was. But chapter four, they make it to the other side of the wall, and they see a big barren desert.

And Peter mentions he felt like Alice and Grimes were at odds before his death, and reveals he got a prestigious award that Grimes had told Alice she would get. This is where he plays them against each other. She reveals Grimes took her on a research trip to Italy that Peter was supposed to go on.

Here they apologize to each other. Alice thinks back to before starting her PhD, when she was told to explore options other than a tenure-track job. And there's talk about conservative governments in Europe and the United States, and the emphasis on profit, tenure jobs, and magic are rare.

It's difficult to work in a field that's outside academia, the magic field outside academia. But Alice is not willing to entertain any of these options. And she's processing the history, her own history, and how she got here.

And then Alice wakes up nestled next to Peter in chapter five, and that's where he gets the actual erection, the sleeping erection. So it's in chapter five, not chapter two. But they get over that.

As they eat, they discuss their own maps of hell. That's what you showed the audience just a few seconds ago, minutes ago. And before they leave, Peter again brings up their sleeping arrangement.

Alice wishes their relationship could be as easy as it had been in the past. As Peter talks, the wall they descended yesterday disappears, and hell takes shape of a place they both are familiar with, campus. Then on a section titled On Reincarnation, the book explains that hell is not a place of internal damnation.

Rather, souls are continuously flowing, page 78, between worlds as one is reincarnated, though no one can agree on how it works. They also do not know the role of punishment as it relates to hell. They do know, or they think they know, souls eventually traveled to Lord Yama in other mythologies, Hades, Anubis, and they continue that discussion.

In chapter six, the map settles into a classical looking campus, but with no greenery or undergraduates. Only the library building is in focus, and Allison realizes it must be the first court pride. Inside, shades, that's what the souls are called, they go to hell.

Shades move between the stacks. A shade informs Alice and Peter that they must perform a task to move on, and it is to give an oral defense of their answer to the prompt, to find the good. A shade named George Edward Moore volunteers to give them a tour.

He explains that people can end up in pride for anything, for insisting people cite their own research to simply being a creative writing student. So you die, you go to hell, and here you have to defend the good, whatever the good is. Moore takes them to his office.

He wants to talk to Peter about Cambridge, because he really loves Cambridge. And here we see Kwong commenting on the misogyny of academia, which I've seen in my own experience with my own eyes, where Moore, all he does is talk about Peter and goes, S. Cambridgeman, S. Cambridgeman, S. Cambridgeman, but completely ignores Alice. So Moore says that they have to answer the research question first, but admits no one has solved it satisfactory during his time there.

Alice gets him to agree that if he uses two premises to support the conclusion that they must complete the question, they'll stay. Moore gets lost in adding new premises and Alice and Peter sneak away. So that's one through six there.

My commentary stays from where I told you in private conversations. Love this. Concept is great.

By the time I got to chapter six, though, I was like, okay, it's still cool. I'm not totally hating, but I'm just not drawn into it. You and me both, especially, I know that we're not there yet, but chapter 12 is where I kind of got lost, where I kind of gave up, like, all right, this is not going to be what I had hoped for.

Because when we when we read summaries, when we hear concepts, we're like, oh, man, and our imagination is triggered, which is great because we're like, oh, it could be like this. This could be fun. Oh, what if they tied in bubble? It's cool.

It's engaging. Like, you've got me. Look, you got me enough where we bought the book and we said, this looks good.

The summary sounds fun. Let's do it. And so we did.

And here we are. Right. But it was just like it felt like young adult dark academia.

But what young adults are going through set in and we talked about this earlier, set in grad school. And so like young adults assuming what grad school will be like because they haven't experienced the world yet. And that's kind of our biggest critique here.

Like I heard some of the ones that you you did some research on, but it's like, all right, some of them, to your point, I also don't agree with, you know, because when you woke up next to me with morning glory, I didn't complain. You know, I was just like, oh, yeah, that's pretty normal. I you'll laugh about that later.

All right. Well, I was going to say I was going to say one thing that just came to me because later on in the book, we realized that Peter saw Grimes sexually abusing Alice. Yeah.

And maybe that's why Peter is insistent on apologizing and always is so careful to reference Alice's safety and autonomy, integrity. So, OK, again, I get it, but it could have been it could have been executed better. He just seems he just seems so awkward doing it.

He could have been more, dare I say, forceful or more. And I don't I don't want to spoil it all on the front. I just I just didn't see his responses to what I understood later as like, oh, OK, because he saw her being abused.

But his responses seemed not believable to me in the moment that, yeah, the characters. Here's the thing. The complexity that the characters hold that we get to read when you go through the book comes across as young adult.

Again, that's fine. That's not like it's not that young adult books shouldn't exist. It's just that it's a mismatch in your in my mind of time and place versus experience and maturity of characters.

Because the thing is, I do believe those characters are being authentic. I just don't think that authenticity gels with being in grad school. That's it.

That's literally my one hang up. So anyway, let's let's let's keep rolling here. All right.

So the next section that I broke out is chapter seven through eleven. So they leave the first court and are faced with the Lethe, which runs between the courts of Lord Yama's domain. And the Lethe is a river of forgetting.

After one forgets their memories, they can be reincarnated. Alice sees Old Lady Mengpo, who is a guardian of the river, who enchants Alice into wanting to forget her memories. Peter manages to bring her back to herself.

They walk along the river, but the second court gets no closer. This I kind of liked where they keep walking and walking. And it seemed endless.

And there's this feeling of hopelessness that Alice gets or they're distraught, both of them, because they want to do this thing, which is find grimes and drag them back to Earth. And Alice is dark when you get to the later parts. But yeah, why? What she was going to do.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. But here, chapter seven is long enough in a thirty five chapter book that they've experienced some things and they have. But one would think, as this is in world, this is not even a critique, this is just an in world observation.

One would think like, OK, after a couple of days in hell, I have at least made some strides, but not so much. Anyway, along the way, creatures made of bone and chalk converge on them. They managed to scare these bone things by getting close to the Lethe as chalk recalls deep memory and the Lethe erases memory.

Even though the bone things leave, their existence confirms the presence of another keen and rational mind, a quote from page 113 in hell, who is watching them. Chapter eight, they stop for the night. Peter, who excels at math, proposes the construction of a magical paradox where they bind the infinite space of hell into a shortcut to where Grimes is most likely to be.

His test pentagram fades upon drawing, as does Allison. Allison's goodness, Alice's. They realize they cannot draw chalk pentagrams due to magic and hell, which frightens Alice as they thought that that was their defense.

Or they thought it was a sure defense, let's say. Here's where Allison falls into despair. Peter distracts her with talk of chalk.

I kind of found this actually, you know, cute where he, although again, my critique is like, dude, you're a grown man, you can do the same thing. You can be helpful and playful with a friend and not do it the way you're doing it. But I got past it because I thought this was a pretty cute scene.

He insists that they are Grimes's students and so will find a way to survive. Here's where the cat Archimedes joins them. He is terrified because he's been hurt by the bone things, but he becomes friends, quote unquote, with them.

He follows them around. Chapter nine, Archimedes is actually the one who leads them toward desire, which is the second court. And this court trapped you with enticements and made you cause, made you the cause of your own suffering.

Page 128 for those following along. And here, Allison recalls a speech Grimes gave when they were first years about how they could adhere to intellectualism and discipline. And not that which is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.

Here's where kind of Grimes's mind fuckery is revealed. Alice tried to integrate this asceticism into her own life. She would withhold food for most of the day, but always broke before reaching Zen.

And here's where I had some empathy for her because I'm like, holy crap. Like I can, I can critique you for, you know, being so overly ambitious that you hurt yourself and others. But I also now see that you were kind of poisoned by this guy.

So it's more than just, oh, Alice just sucks. It's a lot more nuanced than that. Yeah.

So there's, there's a storm. That's a rainstorm that comes down in desire. Um, there's endless doors in each door.

A shade sits trapped in the repetitive pleasure seeking act like masturbating, drinking, or sniffing old books. That I thought was interesting that those three are mentioned, you know, specifically in reference to academia. When you went through academia, did you regularly come across people in the stacks? Um, self, self aggrandizing, uh, to put it more kindly for the audience.

I've never caught anybody self aggrandizing in the stacks. Um, I did catch people sniffing books though. Okay.

But that's a real thing. I'm just going to pause for a second. We're like, I don't know.

So scent is like a really powerful memory trigger. Yeah. Where you can like, are you going to turn this into a short? Maybe.

There's just something about it. So like, to me, when I smell like a new book, it reminds me of the Scholastic Book Fair. It reminds me of like Pokemon cards.

Like it, it triggers these memories of like, oh yeah, I remember childhood. Right. So I, that's the only one of the three that I will pull out as like, well, I understand that one.

I don't go to the library and self aggrandize. Yeah. Personal self fulfillment.

Yeah. Anyway. So Alison becomes judgmental about desires so deep that they overcome the mind.

She insists that Grimes is not there. Peter thinks he is. Maybe there's a chance he is at least.

He opens a door behind which two shades are having intercourse. Alice starts having a series of hallucinations of objectified and sexualized women. So this is her trauma response.

This is the body keeps the score kind of thing. And she feels her body is far away. So she's definitely reliving the trauma that Grimes foisted upon her.

She runs out of the building into the rain and vomits. In a flashback of their Italy trip in the previous summer, Grimes asked Alice what she desires. She says success and lists its trappings.

He calls those the byproducts of desire and repeats his question, grabbing her aggressively. He says she has to desire the work itself, not its benefits. She remembers watching him speak, being overcome by the realization of what she could become and feeling inextricably bound up in him.

That's page 141. They walk away from the building through the storm and see 12 bone things running towards them. Archimedes takes off.

And Alice and Peter run for the Lethe again. Alice takes two hunting knives out of her pack when they reach the river. They try to tell the bone things they mean no harm, but they are attacked.

Peter tells Alice to aim for their spines. She runs to the Lethe and is accidentally splashed. She scoops some up in her flask and sprays it over the bone things, sizzling their chalk parts.

The creatures attack her and they fall together into the water. Boom. Kinda like that.

That part was kinda cool, I'll say that. Alice walks with Peter above her, asking if she remembers him and herself. She hasn't lost any memories.

All the bone things are destroyed. When they make camp, Peter wants to test Alice's memory. She tells him she can't forget anything and reveals a carved pentagram on her skin.

She confirms it was Grimes' work. In Italy the previous summer, he had experimented on animals until deciding to try it on Alice. Holy crap.

Though she gave her permission under duress, she has been extremely afraid. The procedure made her pass out and vomit blood, but it was successful. Peter apologizes that Grimes put her in that position, which also frustrates Alice who believed she wanted it to happen.

She thinks back to a conference and how other women would react when they found out Grimes was her advisor, warning her of Grimes' misconduct. Peter reminisces on Grimes' department funeral and the kind of platitudes people levied at him. He says he and Alice are the only ones who really knew Grimes.

They believed they were tormented because they were strong enough to withstand it. Alice wants to thank Peter for listening and commiserating, but doesn't. In chapter 11, it goes into explaining principles of classical logic, the law of non-contradiction, the excluded middle, some paradoxes.

Alice thinks back to her first dinner at Cambridge where the entire cohort but Peter was present. Erwin and I started talking about Peter's accomplishments and academic parentage until he showed up. When he introduces himself to Alice, she told him she was Grimes' other student.

They made plans to get a drink the next evening and discuss their project. They showed up the next day, but Peter never arrived. Over the next year, she learned that Peter rarely kept his appointments.

She and the rest of her cohort hypothesized about why, but no one knew. When he did show up, he was bright, interested, and reliable. During the first two years, they nevertheless shared good memories, and Alice had thought she'd be able to crack his armor, but he always pulled away.

That's where we end there. So this section, like I've mentioned here and there in reading the summaries, I kind of like this section. I thought it, despite my critiques of the book overall, I found myself a little bit more intrigued by this section.

Because of the backstories and it seems like, maybe I'm overthinking it, maybe I'm wrong, correct me if that's the case, we got a little bit more into the heads of the characters. Abuse, people shouldn't, you know, she was under duress. But the introduction of both entities, Alice and her experience, and we got a little bit of snippets, and it will continue to be unpacked as the story continues.

And then Peter, we get that he's this prodigy who gets to kind of walk in with whatever he wants and do whatever he wants. It is not a unique experience. I think everybody probably, I'm saying probably all the time, I would say that everyone might be able to relate to having an academic rival.

If you care about school. If you don't, then you won't even care. It won't even matter, but there's usually someone who is favorited.

In this instance, it's two people and he used it to pit them against each other. Which should add a nice drama, a nice tension. Right, so Liz brings us to the next section.

The way I broke it up here is 12 through 18. Alice's pentagram scars severely alter her dreams, which layer dreams and reality in horrible new hallucinations for her. She dreams she's abducted by Grimes with a horse head.

They get to the steps from desire to greed. She remembers back to her first year when Grimes called her into his office for tea. He told her Peter was her competition and she'd have to work twice as hard as him for a portion of his success.

They descend the steps and Peter tries to guess at the occupations of the shade passing into greed. There's a woman who materializes in front of them. Alice recognizes the Chinese mythological figure Weaver Girl, a deity who followed her mortal lover into the afterlife.

Weaver Girl separates them and presents a test. A red apple representing going forward together, while the green represents going alone. If they both choose red, they both proceed.

If they both choose green, they both get thrown into the lethe. If one chooses red and the other chooses green, the one who chooses green moves forward. Alice resolves to pick red, but has a series of memories and hallucinations that convince her that she hates Peter.

She comes back to herself with an apple in her hand, and it's the wrong apple. Chapter 13 is a summary of a winter Alice and Peter's first year, and Grimes' fourth-year student suddenly left for Canada after an ultimatum from his girlfriend. Alice and Peter were recruited to work uncredited hours to make up for the loss.

After Grimes' project ended, though, Peter pulls away. He merely nods in greeting and refuses to re-engage any of their old kind of inside jokes or their old relationship that they had built. Alice goes to Italy.

In the memory, again, Chapter 13 gives a summary of those memories. In Chapter 14, Alice thinks she's still reasoning through which apple to grab, but she looks down and she sees she's holding the green apple. Weaver Girl tells Alice to go alone, and begins to wrap Peter in a silk web.

When Peter's almost fully encased, bone things set upon them, they pick up Alice and begin to carry her. But a horn scatters them, and a boatman arrives and begins fighting the boat things. She brings Alice and Peter into the boat before the Weaver Girl can reclaim them.

The boatman turns out to be a boatwoman, Elsef, and Alice recognizes. She was a Grimes advisee who died by suicide a few years ago. And they begin to get a little, well, they, us as the readers get some exposition, and Alice and Peter get a little deep dive on Elsef and Grimes, and a little bit of the rules of Hell.

Elsef says that the Krykes have taken on the attributes of deities in Hell. And she thinks the bone things contain fragments of their minds. Elsef gives them food, it's rats for dinner, roasted rats.

Peter asks how she and the Krykes use magic. She cuts herself and dips the chalk in the blood before writing a pentagram that will fix Peter's scratches. And then in 16, Elsef invites Peter and Alice into her home and shows them her library filled with books.

She finishes, fished, she fished out of the lethe. Elsef begins to ask who Alice's advisor is, Alice lies and says Helen Murray. Elsef tells them, oh, my advisor was Grimes, and she was extremely stressful until the absolute force of it all.

Then they talk about philosophical paradoxes, and Alice knows Elsef wants to help in all this that she's doing, the food, the discussion on the paradoxes, all the advice. Alice knows Elsef wants to help, but feels resentful. So they leave, in chapter 17, they leave Elsef.

I call her Elspeth because it's a common misinterpretation of, and I was going to bring this up to you actually, is there is, Elizabeth is this idea of like who this character is, but there is no Greek person or Greek mythology noted as Elspeth or Elizabeth, but actually the word for hope or the spirit of hope is E-L-P-I-S. The spirit of hope is related to Pandora's box, and Abby was on Girl with All the Gifts, which is a retelling of Pandora's box. So there's that little thing there.

But a couple other things that I, Elspeth is supposed to represent hope for Alice and Peter, but we'll get into that more later maybe. Another thing that pointed out to me in this section is I want to applaud the author for weaving in these Asian mythology creatures. There's only one in the book that I can remember, and it's this one.

I wish we had more time with it, but it's like a trickster fairy, and there's an opportunity here. And if you've never read Asian mythology, whether it's Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. or whatever, they have some wild, wild mythos that I deeply encourage you to take the opportunity and enjoy.

So having that woven in was fun. I very much liked that. Yeah, I did too.

There's moments in this book, despite everything, that I was captivated, because it was something that I haven't been exposed to before, and I was like, oh, this is really cool. So, yeah. So in chapter 17, real quick, Alice wakes Peter in the night to convince him to find the dialethia before Elspeth does, so they can use it to bargain for Grimes' life.

Peter is shocked by Alice's desire to betray their ally. Archimedes is listening and warns Alice not to tell Elspeth. Yeah, two other things that stood out to me up until this point.

One is a gripe of, like, and I sent you this in the notes, that the set-up tension for the prisoner's dilemma, when Alice is in chapter, like, earlier when she's dealing with that mythological creature, where she has to make a decision, is I would have liked more of the romance on the front end of the tension to make there be a stronger difficulty for me as the reader to go, is she going to be, like, a bitter lover? Or is she going to, you know, choose him before that moment, which requires more foreshadowing, right? And then I also made a comment in my notes here that it seemed like the author was almost making a commentary on marriage and relationships throughout the book. Which we don't have to get into, it was just something, it was an observation that I had, or an impression that I had. But let's deviate for a second.

How did you feel about these common interjections of logic puzzles or logic explanations, where it's like, hey, actually, pause, reader, this is the prisoner's dilemma, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da, or hey, pause, you can't have P and not P, which, I mean, you're getting a logic class in this book, which is fine. And I even believe that it is coherent with the authenticity of the characters. I even believe that.

However, as a reader, what was your take on that? I had a difficult time deciding if I hated or loved it. Well, it came up, I listened to it because it was an audiobook, you know, I paid attention. But I think they went on a little too long, but I don't know.

I'm kind of in the murky middle with it. If they weren't there, I wouldn't have missed them. If they were shorter, they probably could have been value-added.

I don't hate them. That's not a critique of the book that I have. Some people critique that, that that took away from the narrative.

I agree in part. Yeah, I agree in part because they were so long. I don't agree in principle that it in and of itself is a distraction from the narrative.

I just think they're a little bit too long. But I can see both sides. And here's where I'm going to just, you know, play Sweden.

Yeah, I don't care. In this instance, I am going to play Sweden with you. I know that there have been previous episodes where I grill you on like making a decision.

But I think that intellectuals do talk like this. And you and I talk like this sometimes where it's like, well, it's not actually this, it's this. And you go off on a diatribe about a thing that like for some reason, and I think it's different for you and I, but I think for these characters, they have this pride of need to be right and to be accurate because that's the realm that they're living in.

And so they're correcting each other on their intellectual knowledge and these specific things, which for the author makes your exposition a lot easier. It's not an exposition being like, hey reader, let me explain to you what's going on. It's very much like anime.

If you ever watched anime where it's like, why can't we defeat him? Well, it's because he has a level three shield that only my weapon can get through and then I will have to stab him in the heart because that's what happens. And here's the thing, I love anime. So it's not a jab at it.

It's just like, that's the level of spoon fed exposition that you're going to get. And so to your point, I didn't hate it. I remembered my logic classes from undergrad and I was like, oh yeah, okay, I get it.

However, I think the story would be stronger if it was shorter at minimum, maybe not fully explained every single time. Yeah, or if they alluded to or referenced these things and had shorter explanations and that explanation was woven more into a fight that they had or a disagreement that they had. A fight, a correction, let me fix your pentagram.

Right, yeah, something like that. It did feel like a class though. And as we're giving our oral review of this, I honestly feel like I'm getting to know the author more by our critiques rather than less.

It's not like Mayville. Yeah, it's never near that. And I didn't hate Mayville as much as you did, although I do share your critiques.

But here it's nowhere near your hate or my hate for that City in the City book. I just think the execution failed. But you know, who am I? I'm just a guy on the internet discussing a book.

So I stand by what I say, but it is what it is. So quickly to wrap up, Alice does convince Peter to betray Elsep. Elsep uses magic to get them to reveal their betrayal and disappears, turns into butterflies and disappears.

And they sail past Greed, the third court, which takes them... Nope, nope, nope, I'm messing up. So they begin to sail past Greed to the third court. And this is where figures out their plot to hurt her in some way or betray her.

She transforms into butterflies and runs away, alters the pentagram, well, alters the pentagram to make Peter and Alice tell the truth. They admit that they're here to rescue Grimes, butterfly swarming them, carrying them off the ship and onto the shore of Wrath. That's what happens.

I had some notes here, they have lines and circles and everything, and I kind of went off kilter for a second. But that's where we end in chapter 18. Bring us through chapter 20 at the moment.

My wife's not back with the money that I need to go pick up these lights anyway. And we'll see, what did I say, there's 37 chapters? Let's see if we can get through 35. Let's see if we can get pretty close.

Yep. So in chapter 18, real quickly, Peter tries to proceed without Alice on shore. He reminds her she had abandoned him to the weaver girl and thinks her idea to betray Elsip was wrong.

Alan rushes to catch up with him. They're both drawn into the water of a bog by the arms of the shades reaching out to grab their legs. Peter wants to return and beg for reentry into the world.

He sees no way they can make it out alive since they don't know the way back. Peter's distressed. He laments being led to death because Alice wanted to be Grimes' favorite and was in love with him.

She corrects him saying that she could finally breathe after he died but went on a journey because she was the one who killed him. And we get to chapter 20. Alice reflects on how she scorned the feminist movement, refusing to be an ally to female classmates and wondering why women spent time proving they weren't inferior rather than simply not being inferior.

She was shocked at the treatment she received after entering Cambridge. Alice fantasized about romantic relationships with Grimes and knew he found her attractive. One day Alice was working late in the office.

At Grimes' request, Grimes is entered with a new office assistant, a woman named Charlotte, and they began to have sex though Grimes knew Alice was there. When Grimes made eye contact with her, she left. Alice thinks about the memory so much she begins to blame herself for being there.

After a prized dinner, Grimes and Alice were both drunk on the attention they were receiving and Grimes insisted they go to his office to lesson plan. Grimes grabbed her face and rather than feeling romantic, Alice felt trapped. She contemplated saying yes to make him happy but was overwhelmed with disgust.

She said she did not want to proceed because she saw Peter before he rushed away. She screamed no at Grimes and left. After that, he redrew his support.

And then later on, she began having suicidal ideations. She was most disturbed by her reduction to a thing page 323. She perceives this as a cliché ultimately does not want to die by suicide and she thinks of those people who do that she kind of has a bad view of them and doesn't want people to think she failed because she committed suicide.

One of the, I'm actually realizing now, one of the things that I would have liked to have been woven in for Alice's story in particular is more of her cultural upbringing because she's clearly not American or like she has an ethnicity that is implied with like King Yama especially when we get to the end and he's like I can be Hades, I can be Satan, I can be and she's like well I'm familiar with King Yama so like let's do that, right? I would have liked more of her cultural upbringing because I think it would have made the stuff that you and I have gripes about or nits, nitpicking, I think it would have put that more into context and I think we would have been more receptive to it because I'm thinking through like if this woman Alice is Asian and she comes from a culture where you have to be perfect all the time and you have to be in line and prim and proper and you can't make mistakes then more of this lines up, right? From what I know about Asian culture and the, the, not particular, what's the word? Attentiveness to detail. I'll say there's a different word but that'll work for right now that they take in all of the things that they do and it, it, it would, it would line up more and I think I'd have less gripes or less nits if there was a cultural explanation from like I come from, you know, a Korean family, blah, blah, blah, here's how grandma used to treat us, you know, our parents, we were never able to do anything wrong, like something like that, right? Yeah, so what you're saying is you want more which I am backing you up 110% in this instance. Yes, yep.

Okay. Yes, yeah. It's not the generic more either.

It's, actually I think it's just the same thing I always say. Is it the same thing? It's the same thing. It's the same thing.

And I agree with you, those, those moments would have been helpful for me to get, you know, more, not infatuated, in line with the character, like attached to the character if those things happened. I'm not going to get too loud because some of this is prepared. Some of it is me talking extemporaneously as we go back and forth.

And there's, there's a change in my perception a little bit. There's a few notches over to the right or the left, whatever, wherever it liking the book versus being, oh gosh, I don't think I like this book on the spectrum that I'm on right now. I think I'm a couple more notches closer to liking the book.

Me too. Yeah, because as we're talking about it because in text and voice text and as we're I'm listening and writing down notes and us talking Those are immediate responses but now that I've had a week and a half to think about it since reading it and Putting down notes on paper and talking through those notes and other thoughts coming up Yes to your point that would have made it better. But I also have a little bit more appreciation for Alice And then here again, sorry for being a broken record, but it still fails to me in execution as We're parsing this out exegeting the book.

We are finding things that are you know, captivating that are interesting that are fascinating But I think the editors I'm not even gonna crap on Kwong. I think the editors did her dirty I'll agree with some of the negative commentators. They pointed this out because they say I love the other book I loved babble.

What the hell is going on here? So maybe it's just an editing thing. That's an interesting note Yeah, if you guys know drop us a link in the comments, like did she use the same editor if so I were absolutely throwing that person out of the bus with with her limited knowledge, but It's I've read other authors where they switched editors and people complain. So that's a that's a really good Possible observation here that maybe it's not her.

Maybe it's her editor. Yeah To your point though. I'm gonna say I think I like the book at like a five out of ten when I read it But dialoguing now and kind of like oh, hey and pieces are kind of getting in place I think I like it like a six or six and a half Maybe a seven at the most because yeah The execution is still not where I think that it should have been for what it was.

Yeah, but I think in dialoguing about it or if you will like retasting it literally it's better it's uh, what's the What's the Japanese flavor umami? It's like umami. Yep. I would say I was somewhere For four and a half When I began reading it and I got to like chapter five six I was somewhere.

Well, let me rephrase this and make this more coherent when I started reading it I was somewhere at a six and then as I progressed slowly through chapter five and Onward it came down to about a four and a half and now that we read That we're talking about it. I'm probably somewhere at six and a half So, you know I'm I'm okay with it more so yeah, although I so not although Yes, I agree something that I wish more authors did is Did a book trailer because I think she would actually sell more copies because again the concepts awesome like it's great. It's fun It's a lot of it's a good time So and for those who don't know a book trailer is basically The author has a short animated to create a trailer for their book in visual form to get people to buy the book It's a lot easier these days because of AI so if you are an author and you're listening to this highly recommend making a book Trailer at least one maybe multiple about your book to tease That we should dive into your world.

Cool. Cool So chapter 21 Peter listens to Allison's story without questioning her he asked her what her plan was to release Grimes from hell and Alice tells the story of an ancient magician called Eric Oh Who was mentioned briefly in Inferno? but is also Also found in other myths She brought an enemy's corpse sold back from the underworld Into the remains on the battlefield to tell a prophecy Alice wants to the same thing to Grimes to bond his hollow soul to his corpse to get power over him and Make him beg for release Peter listens and asks a few clarifying questions But again without judging Alice confesses that she liked the plan because it was grant what Grimes would do Peter holds her hand and she feels safe for the first time in 22 Peter's privilege growing up taught him to expect success and made him careless when he was in child a tutor identified his intelligence, but he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and was chronically ill and As a result did not interact with peers until he passed his a-levels He first liked Cambridge and immediately liked Alice halfway through their first years his worst Crohn's flare-up Since his childhood started his old medicine stopped working and he was constantly in the hospital and became very ill The flare-up interfered with his completion of an important innovative pentagram He decided to stop getting help and deteriorated quickly, but someone found him and called an ambulance before he died Grimes forced Peter to prove the pentagrams of his own stolen work for Grimes to use so Peter did so quickly and Sloppily the next day he learned of Grimes's death a while later He saw the equations Alice left on the chalkboard and realized she wanted to go to hell and decided to follow her That was kind of cool I thought that both of them thinking they killed Grimes and then the slower reveal of that I enjoyed but here we get Peter going now. Actually, I think killed Grimes.

That was a good part of the book in chapter 23 Alice believes Peter but is shocked that Grimes would steal work Okay, Peter wants her to stop valorizing Grimes They realize they've been pitted against each other for years Peter starts working on new mathematical theorems Alice tries to convince him that death will be a relief until she falls a conch on conscience when she wakes Peters figured out how to escape he's created an equation from the hangman's paradox a Recursive paradox about the impossibility of an event happening on an unexpected day within a set quantity of days He writes it for only one person believing it won't work on him But Alice declares they leave together or not at all. She becomes close to admitting she has feelings for Peter, but doesn't chapter 24 Alice thinks back on her first meeting with Grimes He said her application was the strongest he ever had and urged her not to let anyone make her feel like she didn't belong in Cambridge She learned that Grimes also rose to Nicodemia from unlikely circumstances in chapter 25 Alice tries and fails to free Peter because he he got himself Trapped with the pentagram that he created. It's backfired.

Yep she she's crying now and she hears Peter stop screaming because he's being Reminded what happens to him is he starts getting torn apart or something or What exactly happens yeah, so the hangman's Paradox allows Alice to not be attacked by the Kripke's Yeah, and Peter then is able to be attacked by the Kripke's So she passes into cruelty after she stops hearing Peter screams She leaves as she passes into cruelty and see shade trapped in bone cages They could easily escape from if they wished she can't stop thinking about Peter As that desert turns into deadlands and she moves into tyranny the next court When she stops for food, she tries to think of reasons to stay alive now that she knows what death looks like Well, she doesn't care about Rex rescuing Grimes anymore She wants to honor Peter's sacrifice and so she continues with her plan and in chapter 26 Alice wakes and a shade is watching her Archimedes is gone again The shade knows she's alive and a magician and wants to talk She admits her quest to the shade who says he'll tell her how to Get to the gates of dis in return. He wants information on the world of the living He introduces himself as John Gratis. He doesn't care about politics or history, but wants to know What the London skyline looks like and what music people listen to so they exchange Information they talk for a while Several hours later.

They arrive at dis which Alice has read about in many stories Alice thinks the city looks beautiful and vicious Grata says that the shades there won't hurt her But when she asked him what he did to end up in the final court, he says if she wants to survive She can never ask that question another moment of applause for the author is when you dig into What she references like the city of dis like that's that's a throwback to Rome Roman mythology and This is actually just the Roman word for both the God and city of the underworld but it's also Correct me if I miss something here Slava, but the city of dis is a fortified region in the underworld ruled by Pluto from Virgil's Aeneid the the story Yeah, well if you're not getting that from Chad GPT, you're correct If you if you'll reading Wikipedia or any Google article, then yes, that's true. I Don't understand your commentary to me just now, but all right. Yes.

Well, you said correct me if I'm wrong or something What would you say? You asked me about this if you're right about this I'm trying to I'm pulling yes I'm pulling in your memory of like the eight and I don't even think I'm saying it right the Aeneid Aeneid right Virgil's and Aeneid whatever and then also Dante's Inferno, which Slava and I realized we should add to the list. So Verbal for the audience. We're gonna add Dante's Inferno to our to be read list Which as all of you book goers know your TBR is ever growing and ever expanding.

So yeah Yeah, this is also in Dante's Inferno the lower hell. Yep encircled by iron walls Where most serious sinners are punished? so chapter 27 This is courtyard is mostly full of middle-aged men Alice sees them stumbling Alice sees them submitting their dissertations Gratis explains that no one tells them if they don't pass they just wait indefinitely until deciding to try again good lord Gratitude take Gratis takes her to a writing workshop with a group of professors arguing about drafts of their dissertations until they come to physical blows when fire begins to fall from the skies a Shades rush out to catch on fire when cerebus enters through the gate. They rush to get torn up Gratis says they want to want pain because they want to feel something Wow Only one shade Gertrude doesn't join she invites Alice and talk about her perspective which Gratis calls a cult Gertrude leads Alice into the rebel citadel the buildings are whole and the air is fresh Gertrude says that every object finds its way to diss eventually They're gradually building a great city where select shades can enjoy peace Alice wanders around finding the splendor lifeless up close She comes upon a wither tree that shrinks away and whispers when she touches it She enters a garden of many thorny knobby trees and realizes they are all shades She asked why don't they choose to die rather than waiting for the end a shade wakes up from its dump Runs to the left he and destroys itself Part of Alice is jealous.

Well another part finally realizes that she doesn't want to die She runs out of the rebel citadel through the bazaar and away from the city and the lefty Chapter 29 Alice runs until she loses track of the lefty which startles her The lefty was the only limit of infinity in hell Meaning she might be lost in infinity All she knows how to do is to walk as time slips by she begins to pass relics of civilization doesn't recognize She repeatedly reminds herself who she is and all her memories begin to bother her less an Emaciated leopard that was wandering from the above ground begins to stalk Alice kills the leopard she Had like hangs knives. We creates a trap and Kills the leper She spots the pentagram used to make the trap and is able to use the leopards trap to write a counter spell Narrowly escaping the knives. She builds a fire and uses the knives to harvest the leopards meat and organs She cooks and eats them feeling her body's material Wands and strengths for the first time in a long time Chapter 30 gratis finds her she apologized for following Gertrude He says he helped build the rebel citadel but spent too much time debating whether to jump to the lefty So he left he philosophizes about why people don't choose to die when it seems like the most logical choice He is searching for that answer.

He asked every sojourner he finds He asked her what she's gonna do and she says she's gonna kill the Kripke's He points her to the river, but tells her she'll need protection She makes weapons and armor from the leopards bones She decides she has to fight for her life gratis tells Alice to snort chalk When she does she's flooded with memories that aren't hers from the ancient sea creatures who make of the chalk I When when I read that I just started laughing because I was like there's just a lot of Rubber banding going on on like the second half of this book where it's like, okay city of dis Okay, you met a guide again All right, cool checks out fine Guide is mysterious Also funny when people are like throwing themselves at Cerberus, which is a three-headed dog for those who aren't as familiar with Greek mythology Whatever the quote was you read where it's like they just to like feel something or whatever and I'm like that feels very human and Seems like a thing that people would do in this type of hell where they're like I've been a lot I've been alive now for God knows how long literally and I'm just need to die I'm just gonna throw myself at one of the mouths of Cerberus or let myself be burned alive Because I simply don't want to exist anymore like that. All of that was funny to me and then it's like Hey, buddy, you know what you could do grind up some of this chalk and just give it the old The grad students taking coke to pass exams or something or yes stay up all night yes, so Anyway, carry on after she snorts the chalk She feels capable of quote Devouring the universe. I Say he's doing coke.

That's It's called chalk in this universe. Yeah, and they use it. Oh man, those would be expensive pentagrams though if they were just like Sprinkling coke the pure Bolivian coke.

Yeah. Yeah That's expensive maybe that's that's the cost to get to hell is like one quarter of your life or half your life because it's just It's so expensive, right? I understood now Kwong. I get it.

I get it now Alice finds high ground Near the river. This is 31 and draws many pentagrams and paradoxes and gratis leaves a Horde of bone things arrives most are taken out by her pentagrams as she gleefully destroys those that aren't Coked up out of her mind murdering murdering Kripke's left and right Nick Magnolia and Theophrastus Kripke arrived and destroy her spells Theophrastus charges her Alice grabs him easily but Magnolia attacks and she drops him She fights Magnolia until they are positioned over Zeno's trap. She made she Punctures Magnolia's bags of blood So she and Theophrastus can't escape Alice moves to her more complex work as Nick follows her his magicians curiosity makes him pause to read her work She tries to cast the spell inspired by a ricto Substituting Grimes his name for Nick's but Nick's dick straggles her Archimedes arrives gives her enough time to finish her recitation and close the pentagram circle Alice had dug up Grimes body intending intending to fasten into his soul Now she brings Nick to the place between Cambridge and hell Binding his soul to Grimes's remains above in the hell layer of the room She drags him towards the lethe they both tip in the river 32 Yeah, that's that's that revelation that I mentioned earlier where Alice was like she took his What'd you say dismembered corpse? And put it on a pentagram so that she could bring him back alive This is this is a revenge story, which I didn't realize at the beginning because this woman is dealing with trauma of being sexually abused And then she's going to then do something equivalent to her abuser To make a point or to feel better about it or both Yeah, if Quentin Tarantino is Listening he should make a revenge Flick about this so I found out that there actually is a book trailer We'll do a reaction video to it later so stay tuned for that yes We should do that, but chapter 32 they land painfully in the shallow water Alice cannot move Nick runs to shore, but his memories are erased until he dissolves Magnolia picks up Theophrastus and Walks towards the water as their memories peel away Alice thinks about how much She admired the Kripke's She snuck into one of Magnolia's talks once and was amazed how adorably Nick watched her and how powerful Magnolia was Gratis arrives a ship pulls near and as he walks across the left he on to it.

She asks him Who he was and he says no one she watches him drink a bowl offered by the figure in white Until he becomes a new type of spirit the wake of the boat leaves and pushes Alice to shore Her pentagram scar sizzles away She's first thrilled then panicked that she might forget Peter She feels more of her memories begin to pull away until she's dragged away from the river by Elseth and Archimedes Chapter 33 she wakes up on Elseth's boat and Elseth asked her why the Lethe didn't affect her then asked who Grimes made her scar She asked if Alice still has memories and Alice realizes she has the same Presence and graphs in her mind and gaps presences and gaps in her mind that everyone does now Elseth makes dinner and apologizes for leaving Alice and Peter alone When Alice wakes up the next day Elseth admits she found a dilapidated before meeting Alice and Peter She tells Alice the best use for it is to take it to the Lord Yama in exchange for a boom She gives it to Alice and says she's tired of searching and wants to cross over the river right away In 34 Alice follows a chain of linked souls to Yama's throne He takes the shape of Yan Lu Wang and speaks to her in Chinese Alice offers the dilapidated to trade and explains that Elseth gave it to her Lord Yama is glad the Elseth is now traversing the courts to cross over When Alice tells Lord Yama that she initially came to hill to find Grimes. He makes Grimes appear Grimes immediately begins arguing with and mocking Lord Yama who reminds him that he is there only at Alice's mercy Grimes said he had been haunting Alice leaving breadcrumbs for her to follow him to hell Grime wants to stay and use the dilithia to do anything Alice no longer has the same goals as Grimes. She wants to go home She asks if he cares that Peter is dead and Grimes says his death opened new possibilities Alice realizes Grimes is just a regular cruel man.

She explains she would have used Erectus theory to revive him He says it would have never worked and then and Alice retorts that it already did Nick right crikey Grimes begin to be scared and Lord Yama knots his assent and Alice begins to drop Peter's organic exchange spell around Grimes Grimes tries to leave But Lord Yama holds him inside Alice finishes the pentagram and a wind whips until it tears his essence apart Peter walks through the door and appears where Grimes vanished. That was a pretty good scene, too Chapter 35 Alice and Peter rushing to each other's arms Peter confirms that he did die Alice feels more joy than she's ever had she apologizes to Peter and he apologizes to her and She asked Lord Yama to exchange the dilithia for a journey to the surface and their full lifespans back he gives them only half of their forfeited lifespans back and they go back to the real world a Staircase appears before Alice and Peter Lord Yama tells them to ascend they ascend high enough to see the courts and Alice reflects on her experiences as She takes a last look Alice knows that the Academy no longer matters because she had Peter and they have a future with each other filled with potential They reach a door frame with butterflies Alice gives her last thanks to Elsa. They climb through the courtyard in the Magdalene College Alice is newly appreciative of all the material things in the world She doesn't know why she deserves life, but she knows not to question them Together they climb into the court.

There was a line. He said a minute ago Backtrack like a paragraph and give it to me again. There was something I wanted to comment on Alice knows the Academy no longer matters because she has Peter and they have a future with each other Potential okay filled potential So you just read a line there a moment ago that said filled with potential and as someone who's dated potential Strongly encouraged not doing that Alice but you know you do you girl so Well, live your best life Potential Potential implies what it means right that there is something to look forward to because this has the ability to turn into something Worthwhile or good if we're referring back to You're traversing the plains of Australia.

I don't think that have potential The belief in one's mind Can prove that something has potential to oneself not proof can justify. Yeah, I think has percent potential But that's not the only one there's more and oh every time I don't recommend it. No But that's it that's got a basis or kind of ices or whatever you want to call it hot the boss's yeah what's No, I was gonna do something That's kielbasa for you That's the Polish version.

Yeah the Polish version. I like that So we've already rated a book, you know, we said as we were kind of dialoguing about this and talking about it You know a seven six and a half ish right there. Yeah, we're understanding the author a little more We think we're understanding the story a little bit better In terms of like first read executions still like started high went low almost going on a journey of itself Where it's like starts up here goes down Actually, it's not it's not as bad as I thought it was.

Yeah same same overall a Good read and I think what kept me through it all is the concept itself. I just found absolutely fascinating So did you guys read it? Did you enjoy it? What stood out to you? Are you on the good critique or the bad critique next episode you will enjoy with us the dialogue and dissecting with both Jess and Abby and I kind of love the throwback here of like Elizabeth as a name and it's the spirit of hope and it's related to the Mythos of Pandora's box and Abby was on for that like it just feels full circle to me You can call it serendipity. You can call it whatever you can call it a pentagram I don't know but Abby's gonna go to hell with us as is Jess.

Yep. I'll bring the coke Chalk, I'll bring the chalk. I'll bring the chalk.

Yes, of course That's it that's it folks get the hell out of here or don't cuz we'll see it in hell next time