Song of Kali (Gateway Essentials)

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Whatever. How does Amrita feel about you going off and deserting her and the kid? How old's the baby, anyway? Couple months?" Kolkata is a city of contradictions. One side of the road would show magnificent high rises while the other has shanties and hastily put together human habitations. You travel through roads where garbage is piled high and refuse floats through large bodies of water. Turn a bend in the road and you see a tree lined pavement, well cared for houses and apartments and the road will lead you to some of the swankiest shopping malls in town. There is a mix of the old and the new, the beautiful and the repulsive & the eye catching and the forgettable. Kolkata in short thus is a replica of any other large city in the world. Dan Simmons though paints a grim portrait of this town and calls it in so many words a nest of many evils. Everyone he encounters behaves strangely, and the closer he gets to the truth the darker and stranger things become. The fact that he decided to bring his wife and six month-old child in tow certainly doesn't help matters. Dark forces appear to be at play and Robert and his family are set for a hellish time in the days to come as events begin to spiral out of control.

He has a child, a 7-month-old daughter, whose very existence serves only one unpleasant purpose. His wife's only purpose seems to be to show how stupid he is by contrast. 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? I think there was enough foreshadowing to give one an idea that something bad was going to happen, but you kept hoping that what you think might happen, wouldn't happen--it develops into one of those thriller-type scenarios, where you keep thinking 'Oh, watch out! be careful, don't do that!' My last sight of Abe was of him standing there with his arm and hand extended, either in a half-wave or some mute gesture of tired resignation.Luczak’s search for M. Das leads him to an ancient, brutal cult of Kali worshippers who practice a whole host of depravities including human sacrifice of children. As Bobby delves deeper and deeper into the history and customs of the cult, he discovers a bizarre connection between the cult and the re-emergence of Das whose new verse is a celebration of the goddess of death. Oh, it also grated on me that all the chapters have an epigram taken from an Indian writer except the one chapter that lets in a note of hope and therefore has to return to the light of western civilization with a quote from W.B. Yeats.

This book could have been adapted to a film in the 80s when the book was written, but I don't know if it stands up well enough to gain a contemporary adaptation 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. I'll send you a postcard from poolside at the Calcutta Oberoi Grand Hotel," I said, opening the door.

He was. He is. Not sentimental but optimistic." It was the same phrase I'd used many times to defend Tagore. Hell, it was the same phrase I'd used to defend my own work. 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. And two of my Chicago Cycle pieces were dedicated to him," I said. "But I guess we were all a bit premature. Das seems to have resurfaced in Calcutta, or at least some of his new poetry and correspondence has. Harper's got some samples through an agency they work with there, and people who knew Das say that he definitely wrote these new things. But nobody's seen the man himself. Harper's wants me to try to get some of his new work, but the slant of the article is going to be ‘The Search for M. Das,' that kind of crap. Now here's the good news. Harper's gets first refusal on any of the poetry I get rights to, but we can print the rest in Other Voices." 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.

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. urn:oclc:875414507 Scandate 20100902002257 Scanner scribe17.sfdowntown.archive.org Scanningcenter sfdowntown Source What makes this an interesting story is that, even after reading it, I am not sure if the events were supernatural or a culmination of events that made it seem so. The rather nebulous ending didn't really do it for me.And this is the point of the book - it is not pure psychological horror nor is it the horror of monsters and demons but it is something different again, a novel of cultural horror of its own time and place with elements of both. I do not recall the phrase Kali Yuga being used but that is what it is about - a deeply conservative sense that the Age of Kali was upon us. You may well be right,” I said. “Although I wouldn’t presume to say that I understood the ‘American psyche’ or the ‘Indian psyche’—if there are such things. First impressions are necessarily shallow. I appreciate that. I’ve admired Indian culture for a long time, even before I met Amrita, and she’s certainly shared some of the beauty of it with me. But I admit that Calcutta is a bit intimidating. There seems to be something unique… unique and disturbing about Calcutta’s urban problems. Perhaps its only the scale. Friends have told me that Mexico City, for all of its beauty, shares the same problems.” 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." Yeah, I remember," said Abe. "I stayed with you and Amrita for a couple of days in your Boston apartment when the New England Poets' Alliance held that commemorative reading for him. You read some of Tagore's stuff, and excerpts from Das's epic poems about what'shername, the nun—Mother Teresa."

Why the hell are they sending you, Bobby?" asked Abe. "Why doesn't Harper's send one of its big guns if this is so important that they're going to cover expenses?" We're, my expectations high going in? After bloody winning such a prestigious award with your debut book? Just who do you think you are Mr Simmons, that's outrageous. The answer was yes! Abe, it's all set," I said. "We're leaving next week." I hesitated a moment. "They're paying very well and covering all expenses," I added.Chet Morrow called me," I said. "He said that he had been impressed with the piece." I neglected to tell Abe that Morrow had forgotten Tagore's name. But out of the great tragedy that befalls the two of them in Calcutta, there is still hope to be found in the world. As the hero Robert Luczak says in the end, “But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.” That's the fragment of a new poem that Das is supposed to have written within the past couple of years." What an exceptional book within the horror genre - a true masterpiece and extremely hard to put down.