Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Think you know true fear? You don't.

Think you've read the most chilling book? Not even close.

Think you can't be shocked? Good luck!

Maybe you're ready for the most truly frightening reading experience of your life, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel that's been terrifying readers for over a decade.

Song of Kali.

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

Rating : - Exceptional supernatural thriller by Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons presents Calcutta as a city haunted by its past and present in Song of Kali. Writer Robert Luczak goes to Calcutta on an assignment to retrieve the manuscript of a massive poem written by the legendary Das. Das disappeared nearly a decade ago yet suddenly new works that appear to be his surface. Luczak is also supposed to try and interview the reclusive author while there taking his Indian wife Amrita as interpreter and their baby Victoria. Luczak discovers that the poem that Das has written is designed for some evil purpose and suddenly finds his family in peril as he tries to uncover the truth of what really happened to Das.

One of author Dan Simmons' earliest published novels, Song of Kali won the World Fantasy Award when it was published back in 1985. Simmons is an accomplished prose stylist and has written a riveting supernatural thriller. The minor flaw in the book also manages to be a strength as well because the main character of Luczak often has to play the role of idiot when it comes to the mythology that provides the backbone of the novel. Someone that we would expect to be better informed about ends up having to have things explained to him and, in turn, to us the readers. This narrative device works pretty well overall although there are times when it does stretch credibility.

Unlike some reviewers, I don't feel that hte ending is forced, overly sentimental or optimistic. There's a sense of unfinished business and doubt about the future of humanity even as Luczak finally finds himself able to live again.

Song of Kali still demonstrates that Simmons is a master of storytelling. It's pretty clear that his skills were continuing to develop with Kali. Kali clearly set the stage for later more masterful works such as his horror thriller Carrion Comfort and even his science fiction masterpiece Hyperion Cantos.