num_pages: 311
description: "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
language: English
title: Song of Kali
titlecomplete: Song of Kali
genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, India, Horror, Novels, Mythology, Fantasy, Supernatural
ratings_count: 13493
places: Calcutta, India
awards: awardedAt: 504950400000
name: World Fantasy Award
category: Best Novel
publisher: Tor Books