Song of Kali - Hardcover

Simmons

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747200335 ISBN 13: 9780747200338

Publisher: Headline, 1987

Synopsis

Calcutta: a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the foetid embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction. Robert Luczak has been hired by Harper's to find a noted Indian poet who has reappeared, under strange circumstances, years after he was thought dead. But nothing is simple in Calcutta and Lucsak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare when he learns that the poet is rumoured to have been brought back to life in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.

About this title

Review:

"O terrible wife of Siva / Your tongue is drinking the blood, / O dark Mother! O unclad Mother." It is remarkable that prior to writing this first novel, Dan Simmons had spent only two and a half days in Calcutta, a city "too wicked to be suffered," his narrator says. Fortunately back in print after several years during which it was hard to obtain, this rich, bizarre novel practically reeks with atmosphere. The story concerns an American poet who travels with his Indian wife and their baby to Calcutta to pick up an epic poem cycle about the goddess Kali. The Bengali poet who wrote the poem cycle has disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Horror critic Edward Bryant calls Song of Kali "an exactingly constructed, brutal, and uncompromising study of the degree to which an evil place may permeate and steep all that makes us human" and writes that it embodies "the stance of a psychologically violent novel about a violent society as a defensible and indisputably moral work of art." Song of Kali won a World Fantasy Award. --Fiona Webster

About the Author:

Dan Simmons won the World Fantasy Award for SONG OF KALI, his first novel, inspired by his travels in India. In the 1990s he rewrote the SF rulebook with his Hyperion Cantos quartet. He has also written thrillers. Alongside his writing he maintains a career as a college lecturer in English Literature in the USA.

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0747200335
• ISBN 13: 9780747200338
• Binding: Hardcover