Customer Reviews

Song of Kali

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Plot Summary: Bobby Luczac and his wife and baby are off to Calcutta to find a poet who is apparently creating new material despite being dead for over 8 years. How can M. Das be writing new poems, how is he still alive, where is he to be found? These are the questions Bobby is to answer as well as collect a new manuscript for his stateside periodical. Despite warnings from colleagues, the whole family flies to India, birthplace of his wife. Nothing good happens for Mr. and Mrs. Luczac from this point on.

Opinion: I'm kind of in between on this book. At points I am amazed and disgusted by the imagery and the squalor of Calcutta. At other points I find myself just skimming to get on with the story. Simmons does a good job overall painting the city as this almost black hole of misfortune, horror, and evil. Much of it based on cult worshiping of the goddess Kali. I was impressed at how far he took the things that could and did happen in this book. Far past where a weaker author would have maybe spared us a little. Then things got a little out of character after the climax of the book. There is hope after all we are led to believe. The characters were all decently written including the city which is the main character of this horror story. I can't say how well this portrays Calcutta because I don't know anyone who has been there, but it was very vivid for me from the book that I wouldn't want to.

Recommendation: I would recommend this to Simmons fans because he is a good writer and the story is pretty good. I would not suggest this as your first Simmons book though as I think his Hyperion and Ilium stories are much better. I rate it 3.5 out of 5 overall.

I am *never* going to Calcutta.

Apparently he only spent two and a half days there, but Calcutta must have made one hell of an impression on Dan Simmons. I don't know if his portrayal of it is accurate, but he's presented a dark, dirty, frightening city -- a place I've visited in my nightmares many times since reading "Song of Kali."

This is a novel that really stuck with me. In fact, after reading it I had to get rid of my copy, because it freaked me out so much. It's a thoroughly engaging story -- part of why it was so upsetting is that I believed the protagonists (a writer and his wife and baby) so completely.

Lots of writers have approached the subject of bad places -- mostly in the form of haunted houses (Shirley Jackon's classic "The Haunting of Hill House," Richard Matheson's "Hell House," and Stephen King's "The Shining" all come to mind). This is the first example of a *city* as bad place that I've seen. It's also the first book in a long time that's really scared me.

According to Hindu teaching, we are in the Kali Yuga, the Age of Kali. Dan Simmons may well you believe it. With great intelligence and unexpected sensitivity, Simmons relates a story that could easily have turned to schlock, but which instead deals with cultural phobias, nightmare images, and the existence of a very unintellectual (and yet also very un-Stephen King) form of evil with the same deft touch. Certainly, the book sells as horror and roting corpses and all manner of nastiness abound, but Simmons handles them in context -- a context in which pain is sometimes sacred and the truly horrific merely a part of the pattern.

The point that makes _The Song of Kali_ so intensely readable is that Simmons doesn't make the mistake of avoiding the cultural politics of a horror novel about a foreign deity...nor does he make the greater mistake of beating one over the head with relativistic blather. In one of the novel's most derailing passages, a character describes the differences between India and the west as the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry...irreconcilable, nearly inconceivable.

_The Song of Kali_ has its flaws, but under the poisonous gleam of Simmons's Calcutta and even under the personal disaster that shatters the protagonist's life, there is an awareness of the darkness of an age where unspeakable violence is truly commonplace. That awareness, combined with the chilling thought that we have not, perhaps, chosen the right geometry, make reading this novel an experience that you will not -- and should not -- soon forget.

After havining seen the cover blurbs. I spent about two thirds of this book wondering what the hell I was missing. The overlong setup failed to get me invested in the main character, a self-involved poet, who comes across as rather petulant, dull and disengaged. We spend a short eternity with Luczack's literary mentor, a boring cliche of a cigar-chomping New Yorker with a heart of gold. Luczack's one saving grace is his capable, intellectually curious wife, whom he mostly talks down to and/or places in peril. (There's a ridiculous bit late in the book where he makes a big display of "I'm not leaving you again, kiddo", only to wander off again as soon as she falls asleep.) I would have been grateful for Luczack to get killed off early and the focus shifted to the wife.

In addition, while the horrified-travelogue aspect of the book is effective, we never go any deeper than Luczack's ugly-American revulsion at a society he doesn't understand. Simmons seems content to paint most residents of Calcutta as potential gangsters or murderous fanatics, and leave it at that. The story only gets interesting (far too late in the book) when the Luczack character mercifully shuts up long enough to let some of the Indians tell their own stories. The storyline involving the Kali cult is genuinely, darkly fascinating and I wish Simmons had done more than scratch the surface of it.

The emotional climax could have been wrenching if only I'd been invested in the main character, and unfortunately the novel peters out with him descending into a world of self-pity for several chapters. Some really interesting horror material here, sandwiched into an otherwise boring novel.

If you are intersted in this book, DO NOT READ THE REVIEWS BELOW. The reviews below give away MAJOR plot points and ruined my reading of what would have been a suspenseful book.

Particular scenes in The Song of Kali are still haunting me over a month after finishing the book. This is certainly the mark of a good horror story. What sets this novel apart is the mood created by the author. The story takes place in Calcutta, painted as a locale that is as evil as any you might find in your worst nightmare. The atmosphere and the local characters add to the effectiveness of this book in a way that exceeds any other book in recent memory. For lovers of well-written horror, you 'd be hard pressed to find a better page-turner. I'm a huge Stephen King fan, but this one has images that horrify more than Mr. King's best. If you read this book, you will be thinking about it for months. Try it and enjoy...

After reading Harlan Ellison's comments about this book years ago, I knew I had to have it. Not an easy book to locate then, but once I had it... Oh my God. I'd never read a horror novel like it. It was bloated with the corruption and festering malignancy of Calcutta: "Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist." With that provocative opening line, Simmons opens up a universe filled with an overpowering sense of the otherworldly that the Western mind cannot escape.

The novel feeds on our (inherent?) xenophobia, our fear of women (manifested in the devouring goddess of Kali), our passion for violence, and the all-too-real fear of our children taken from us. "All violence is power," the poet Das says. "Sometimes there is no hope. Sometimes there is only pain."

THAT, friends and neighbors, is the true crux of all great horror fiction, and Simmons doesn't hesitate to take us as far down the river at the heart of darkness. His knowledge of classic poetry, particularly Yeats, and Luczak's wife's knowledge of geometry, infuses this novel with an intelligence and moral weight most horror writers either fake or never bother with in the first place. And India has such a vast and bizarre mythology I'm surprised no one explored it before like this.

I love this book, and even picking it up again to write this review I'm tempted to read it a third time. Anyone with any knowledge of India's myths will find it all the more disturbing. The use of story-within-story that heightens the horror (for some reason I'm a sucker for this narrative trick; Lovecraft did it, King did it in "Pet Sematary", Anne Rice too-- it always chills me to the bone) I can't say enough of the fascination this book holds for me, its relentless darkness, its stench of rancid flesh, its charnel house images, its fusion of sex and death, its climax of delirium and fire--and the final moral stand of a man who comes to realize how truly helpless he is in the face of so much darkness.

Listen to the song of Kali if you have at all a true taste for the macabre, the funereal, the hopeless, the living dark, the taint of blood: "The world is pain/O terrible wife of Siva/ You are chewing the flesh/Your tongue is drinking the blood, O dark Mother! O unclad Mother/O beloved of Siva/The world is pain."

"The Age of Kali has begun/The Song of Kali is now sung." Hear it? Listen....

I read this novel mainly due to the blurbs on the back cover, which imply that this novel is a horror masterpiece. It isn't one.

SONG OF KALI is an interesting, well-written novel in many ways. In particular, Dan Simmons does a great job creating atmosphere. Most of this novel takes place in Calcutta, India, which is not a very pleasant place to be. Simmons does an excellent job describing the city and I honestly felt like I was there myself, his writing was that good.

Other than that, I didn't care for this novel that much. The characters are mainly unlikable intellectuals who are too self-absorbed for their own good. As a result, I didn't really care very much about what happened to them. The plot starts out very well, but then meanders and doesn't end in a satisfactory manner. Parts of this book are quite boring.

I didn't feel like I wasted my time reading this novel, but it isn't for everybody. If you're looking for a scary, well-plotted book with vivid characterization, my advice is to skip this one and read some of Dan Simmons' later work, which is far superior to SONG OF KALI.

As an avid reader of horror, fantasy and science fiction, I like to think that I'm immune to any lasting effects from the frightening images that emerge from those dark places within the minds of our best contemporary authors. Most of the time my reaction is, "Been there ... done that ... NEXT!". But last night I finished reading SONG OF KALI by Dan Simmons. And I fear that the images he conjures will be with me for a very long time to come.

This horrible/delightful/remarkable book works on your psyche on two levels: it attacks your senses by describing, in graphic detail, the mundane, "real world" horrors that exist just beyond the field of awareness for most Westerners living in affluent, post-industrialized "societies"; but worse yet, it open up that dark place so deeply imbedded within our basal ganglia that it can only be assumed to be the most primal and ancient of human nerve centers. It triggers an autonomic recoil from the pure darkness, cold malevolence, and absolute EVIL that surrounds us. We begin, innocently enough on the first level, following our protagonist's journey to solve a mystery ... and then slowly ... methodically ... step by step and with our guard down ... we are led blindly into reeking depths of the primordial abyss. I've never been to Calcutta. But, like many other Americans, I have traveled to a number of other "Third World" settings, both in groups and as a individual. I never cease to be appalled at the the arrogance and materialistic ego-centricity of too many American travelers who fail to respect or even try to fathom other cultures, unfamiliar traditions, and those painful economic realities suffered by much of the REST of the world. Simmons captures the naive, and distinctly American, arrogance of his protagonist (Robert Luczak) remarkably well. But then he takes it one step further. He rolls Luczak's arrogance in broken glass and shoves it right down his throat.

I like to think of myself as a savvy reader. Most of the time, I can sense where a story is heading before it actually takes me there. All the way through the first three quarters of SONG OF KALI, I was pretty certain I knew where the author was leading me. I expected the expected. I was anticipating the cliché. But the sheer horror of that final twist of the literary knife-in-the-gut left me utterly speechless, with my heart a-pounding and my mouth hanging open like a drooling simpleton. I simply could not believe that I didn't see this coming! I was caught so completely off guard that I actually had to back up and re-read that section several times, just to be certain that I was really reading what I thought I was reading. What an ending! My congratulations to Dan Simmons for writing such a dark masterpiece. I wonder, what deep, dark recess in your mind did you have to tap to dredge up something so completely unfathomable? What nightmares you must suffer.

Or Kolkata now as it is called.Well I like most things horrific and I chanced upon this quaint little book written way back in the 1980's.Surprisingly it is really accurate and vivid.Having lived there myself I have grown up to some of the images,the overshadowing elements of poverty and life growing ceaselessly through it.However,Dan Simmons effectively paints a horrific picture in a seemingly mundane everyday Calcutta life.But the Goddess exists,I have been to Kalighat myself,knelt before Kali and offered her my prayers.Still people sacrifice animals to the goddess on Satrudays and Tuesdays,known as Kali's days.It is believed that the Goddess has some powers as she is "jagrata" as the author calls it.Regarding Kapaliks and Tantriks,they still abound both in Kalighat and in a nearby place called Tarapith.Which brings me back to the accuracy.While some of the prose is rather against my tastes, what with a sexual rendezvous with one of the most esteemed Goddesses,the book is powerful and effective.And factual.Calcutta is that and no amount of fractal math or parallel universes can cause it to be otherwise.However,apparently the horror isn't there.Its just a bunch of poor people roaming around half naked as the humidity and the sun render clothes to be a burden.And presently you can contrast it with the high risers and the McDonalds which have permeated the old by-lanes,as if trying to convert a dead man.

However,inspite of the modernity,if you do go to Kalighat in the middle of the night,with the scream of the jackals and the small talk of the local mafia,you might just glimpse a very vivid image of Kali in the blood of all her glory.