Song of Kali (Gateway Essentials)

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Nope. That's about it. Of course there are only a few stanzas in that fragment," I said. "And it's a rough translation."

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. 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.) The book could not be written now. The South Asia of that period of hopelessness has been replaced by a vibrant, expansive India (though let us see what the recession brings) and the despair has shifted to a declining West. The book is filled with a vision of the teeming filthy hordes of Calcutta that would be regarded as insulting, almost racist today. In that sense, this book is oddly much closer to the imperial adventure tales of the thuggees of the Raj than it is to our 'modern' world only 25 years on. 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?" Abe had a point. Not many people had heard of Robert C. Luczak in 1977, despite the fact that Winter Spirits had received half a column of review in the Times. Still, I hoped that what people—especially the few hundred people who counted— had heard was promising. " Harper's thought of me because of that piece I did in Voices last year," I said. "You know, the one on Bengali poetry. You said I spent too much time on Rabindranath Tagore."La novela narra la historia de Robert qué es contratado para After a couple of days of dead-end leads, an Indian couple is caught at the airport trying to take someone resembling Victoria out of the country. Robert and Amrita go to identify their child, but find that she is already dead. I'd go so far as to say this is the most frightening book I've read from Simmons. Terrific horror and a must read for any fan of the genre. A perfect gateway into his work. I was even tempted to give this one five stars. But then I remembered The Terror and Hyperion, which are better by some way. But that's how this guy sets the bar. Still 4.5 stars rounded up to five is not to be sniffed at and technically I did give it five. So sue me! urn:lcp:songofkali00simm:lcpdf:6652b94e-6c35-437a-9590-70c9f0ff5fc6 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier songofkali00simm Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2p56b60c Isbn 0812515927

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.Does for India what Heart Of Darkness did for Africa; uses it as a setting for a tale of unease and terror that could have been set anywhere, really, except that using a third-world setting plays to the western gallery's delicate sensibilities. Dan's first published story appeared on Feb. 15, 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. He's always attributed that coincidence to "helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative importance of writing and life."

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." Realmente una lástima, una novela que tenía todos los elementos para ser una obra de primer nivel, pero que se ve arruinada por su flojo e innecesario tercer acto. We begin following the protagonist, Robert Luczak's, journey to Calcutta in India to obtain a manuscript and get to the bottom of a mystery concerning Bengali Poet M. Das. Rumoured to be dead for just over a decade, he has recently resurfaced with a new body of work. And the magazine that Luczak works for is just dying to get the inside scoop. What could possibly go wrong? No." I blinked in surprise. Abe had traveled widely as a wire-service reporter before he wrote his first novel, but he rarely talked about those days. After he had accepted my Tagore piece, he idly mentioned that he once had spent nine months with Lord Mountbatten in Burma. His stories about his wire-service days were rare but invariably enjoyable. "Was it during the war?" I asked.This book, just, no! Whoever thinks they're getting a cultural lesson about India, please, stop. Whoever thinks this is a good horror book, either I'm not so easily scared or... I don't even know how to finish that sentence. If you're scared by third world countries, brown people, or clumsily vague supernatural conspiracy theories then this is your kind of horror. I am used to Americans and their reaction to our city. They will react in either one of two ways: they will find Calcutta ‘exotic’ and concentrate only on their tourist pleasures; or they will be immediately horrified, recoil, and seek to forget what they have seen and not understood. Yes, yes, the American psyche is as predictable as the sterile and vulnerable American digestive system when it encounters India.” 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. 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.

Simmons is an author among authors, and if you have never read him this is a good place to start. Song of Kali may not dazzle, but it will pique your interest and get you ready for his more daunting books (of which there are many). There is also an undercurrent of despair at the Holocaust and nuclear destruction that somehow has also become attenuated - Rwanda and Srebenica have not normalised the horrors of the 1940s but, as the survivors of older horrors die of natural causes, modern small genocides seem more managable to liberals - if only the UN could get its act together. Such massacres are no longer placed in that category of all-encompassing global existential evil that excites hopelessness - like Calcutta does to Simmons' narrator. I liked the 'Song of Kali'. It was a good story. I'm just not sure I'd count it as great horror. It wasn't that scary. It was definitely more psychological and mental than most. It seemed like a strange mixture of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, all with a big glob of Calcutta madness and poetic mysticism. His hero, Bobby Luczak, is a coward who behaves stupidly and illogically; he's an effete literary type who one would think would treat his mathematician wife with some respect, but who repeatedly hides things from her and deserts her without reason. He claims to have a terrible temper, yet he's impotent in a crisis.Sloppy seconds," grumbled Abe and chewed on his cigar. This was the kind of enthusiastic gratitude I'd grown used to during my years with Bronstein. I said nothing, and eventually he spoke again. "So where the hell's Das been for eight years, Bobby?" La novela narra la historia de Robert qué es contratado para ir a la ciudad de Calcuta en busca de un famoso poeta indio, viaje que realiza junto a su esposa y recién nacida hija, y en el que también descubrirá una serie de macabros sucesos en torno al culto a la diosa kali que cambiarán su vida y la de su familia para siempre. All through the first half or thereabouts, I gritted my teeth and cursed. I didn't think I would enjoy the rest of the journey. Had I given up partway through, I would have come to goodreads years later (I read this book in 2007 or so) and probably given it two stars. 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.