This book goes to my favorites list for the simple fact that after a long while, I was completely drawn into the ambiance of a tales setting. The author did a good job with the material provided and gave many of the characters a unique voice. As such, I would be willing to listen to another book Boyett narrated Simmons takes the standard literary model and subverts it into a narrative that works precisely because we can see a highly cultured but often weak and often dim 'one-of-us' be out-manouevred and out-classed by a cunning underclass of consummate brutality. It is a novel about crime and criminality as much as it a novel of horror - and the horror is visceral because it is real, the filth, the mortuary, the decay of the human body, the disease, the fear of the dark, of monsters ... and the last chapters will shred you if you know anything of love. There is even a skilled irony as the 'hero' notes the difference between his position and would happen in a movie about his position. Not to say that this was a bad read. Simmons descriptions of Calcutta were believable and startling and all too easy to picture considering their nature. It's almost as though Simmons wrote about the city so well that the rest of the story paled in comparision. So maybe I am being unfair, judging one part of the book against the other and penalizing Simmons when not warranted. I nodded. The heat had caused a headache to start throbbing behind my eyes. "Abe, you've just spent time in the wrong cities," I said lightly. "Try spending a summer in North Philadelphia or on the Southside of Chicago where I grew up. That'll make Calcutta look like Fun City."

I found the claustrophobic, filthy and sinister atmosphere of Calcutta, well described. I could almost smell the city while reading. I felt the city’s humidity and the frenzy of all the unfortunate and fortunate people living there.Dan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art. Para iniciar he de decir que me encanta el estilo de Simmons, amé Hyperion, sin embargo, la trama de ésta novela deja mucho que desear. Song of Kali took me by surprise. And it shouldn't as I know how talented an author Dan Simmons is. This is old school horror written by an author with real literary talent. What a debut! Similarly, the war on terror is scary but the opponents are gangsters not the corporatised mass murdering bureaucrats of competing ideologies. Gangsters, despite Simmons' hero's experience, are very bad but not capable (or are they?) of destroying the world. Maybe that is the one doubt that nags at us tweenty five or so years on - that maybe gangsters, terrorists and insurgents can bring the Kali Yuga to pass. A poisonous atmosphere," I said. It nettled me to be quizzed. "As from a swamp. Or any noxious influence. Probably comes from the Greek miainein, meaning ‘to pollute.'"

It's an urban-fantasy horror novel with some genuinely freaky moments, made all the more freaky by their macabre banality. To become a member of the Kali cult, for instance, one need only bring a corpse to the first meeting. It's irrelevant how you get your corpse. You can kill it, dig it up, steal it, whatever works for you, but it makes for a frightening sequence, fraught with "what ifs?" and "holy shits!". And all of this is offered as a reflection of what humanity truly is, even when most of humanity is gleefully hiding its ugly nature behind a saccharine humanism.And I wish that westerners would do a little homework. Nobody spells their name Jayaprakesh. Jayaprakash, sure. Jaiprakash, even. Not Jayaprakesh. Thanks very much kindly. For all the play Simmons makes of Indians mangling English he certainly doesn't hesitate to mangle Indian names. Horror is not my normal territory. It isn't my alternate either. As far as genre fiction goes I probably reach for a horror novel as often as I reach for a fantasy novel. But this is Dan Simmons we are talking about. After reading Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, I was intrigued. How poetic could Simmons make horror? How literate? There's much of violence and its cost running throughout Simmons' work (another reason I love him), but it appears in myriad forms. And always from a different genre direction. Historical fiction, urban fantasy, hard sci-fi, horror, historical horror, whodunnit, poetry, mythos, and whatever else works.

Whispers can still be heard, though, of the "Song of Kali", the condition of humanity dominated by hatred and violence, perfectly embodied, in the mind of the narrator, by the squalor and chaos of Calcutta. Okay," grunted Abe. "Go to Calcutta." His tone of voice let me know precisely what he thought of the idea. This is a masterpiece that might be read as a companion piece to Ligotti - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24... - and King's The Stand - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14... . It does offer some small hope in a way that Ligotti does not (I cannot say more without spoiling the tale) and it is much better than The Stand (written around the same period as Simmons' book), if only because it is more 'real', but all three are explorations of the dark side of the condition of humanity from a uniquely American perspective. It's not "scary" as in "boo" but it is horrific in it's stark depiction of the horror lurking in the human soul. urn:lcp:songofkali00simm:lcpdf:6652b94e-6c35-437a-9590-70c9f0ff5fc6 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier songofkali00simm Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2p56b60c Isbn 0812515927He's filling in as temporary assistant editor at Harper's," I said. "He wants the Calcutta article in by the October issue." La novela narra la historia de Robert qué es contratado para He, like many Westerners, seems to have been expecting India to be all incense and smiling children with beautiful dark eyes and beautiful saris and delicious (though extremely hot!) food; without knowing about the darker aspects of that alluring land. (I admit that I had not known about some of them either! I've been to Bombay, but my visit there wouldn't have prepared me for anything like some of the things that the protagonist had encountered in this book.)