Dark Academia Grows Up

In Katabasis, two graduate students at a magical version of Cambridge University go to Hell to rescue the soul of their adviser so he can give them a letter of recommendation. Anyone who has spent time in graduate school will understand the joke entailed in this premise, and also the extent to which it really isn’t a joke. Possibly most graduate students who have tried to go into the academy afterward—at least during the past few decades, when the perpetual scarcity of academic jobs has fallen to catastrophic lows—have understood themselves, in one way or another, to be going through Hell in order, as their prize, to get more of it.