Song of Kali (Paperback)

by Dan Simmons (Author) "Don't go, Bobby," said my friend..." (more)
Key Phrases: terrible wife, cremation grounds, New Delhi, New York, Michael Leonard Chatterjee (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

Review
"The best novel in the genre I can remember. Dan Simmons is brilliant!" --Dean R. Koontz

"Song of Kali is as harrowing and ghoulish as anyone could wish. Simmons makes the stuff of nightmares very real indeed." --Locus

"Dan Simmons understands terror and what it does to readers. Where Stephen King flinches, Simmons doesn't." --Edward Byrant, Mile High Futures

"Shock treatments abound!" --The Chattanooga Times, Tennessee

"An absolutely harrowing experience." --F. Paul Wilson
-- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (January 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031286583X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312865832
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,238 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Atmospheric, Insidious and Terrifying, February 10, 2002

By	Miranda Prince "Punky Monkey" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Welcome to Calcutta, November 19, 2004

By	Brian Niehaus (Cincinnati, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lush, breathtaking, deeply disturbing., July 27, 1999

By A Customer

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.