Alice, an ambitious post–grad student in the field of analytic magick, desperately needs the support of her tutor, Professor Grimes, to achieve the academic excellence she so desperately craves.
Unfortunately, he’s dead.
Even more unfortunately – it’s Alice’s fault.
Now she has no choice but to journey to Hell and bring him back.
I loved this book. It really touched a chord with me. At one point in the story, one of the characters, in an attempt to explain her academic imperative, rationalises her emotions by saying – Never mind the day-to-day distractions of everyday life. All she ever wanted was the unhampered time and resources to be able to think.
I’ve had many jobs and enjoyed all of them but one, but no matter how interesting or engrossing the task in hand, there was always a slight resentment that the paying job got in the way of what I considered to be proper thinking. Paying jobs stood between me and the ability to think the thoughts I wanted. They also stood between me and homelessness and starvation, of course, but to have the time to imagine, to dream, to create whole new worlds full of strange new people and places seemed, to me, a never-to-be-achieved luxury. I could only imagine having the time, one day, to take any number of these random elements and weave them into a story of my devising.
As you can see, I did get there in the end, and now I’m not only allowed to do all that but I’m actually encouraged to do it. And then they pay me for it. Time is many different things to many different people, but to me, it’s the luxury of finally being able to do the very thing I most enjoy.
Sorry – rambling again. Back to Katabasis. This is a fabulous story combining philosophy, logic, history, mythology, mathematics, magick, academia, and with a guided tour of Hell thrown in for free. Highly recommended.
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I was confused the last time a book button came up, and inadvertently signed up for Amazon UK - wondering all the while what had happened to my Amazon subscription, and why they wanted me to register again. Eventually I realized I had signed up for Amazon UK, which didn’t make much sense since I don’t live all that far from the founding home of Amazon in the Pacific Northwest of the US. This time I was right on top of things when I clicked your Amazon button and saw immediately I was back to the UK, where now I seem to have an orphan Amazon account that is inaccessible, because probably they’ve discovered I don’t live near you. You are no doubt grateful for that, because if I caught you on the street looking for stray plastic, I would ask you why you were not nose to grindstone and writing as if your self worth depended on keeping me constantly in new stories. Would it be possible for you to have a US Amazon button as well as your homeboy UK button? Only if it’s not too much trouble. I appear to have grown old from all these years of reading and enjoying your books - although possibly aging is not actually caused by most of your characters. Thank you.