City of Dreadful Night : A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India
Lee Siegel is a professional magician and professor of religion at the University of Hawaii. His first novel is a succulent treat for horror readers. In an exuberantly described setting of India in all her violent wonders, we travel with an itinerant storyteller who wears a garland of animal skulls, a silver crucifix, and a battered English top hat adorned with peacock feathers. Here are stories within stories, starting even on the jacket copy, which claims Siegel went to India to research a book on Sanskrit horror literature and then, on the recommendation of a friend, traveled to Varanasi, City of Dreadful Night, to look for the aforementioned old storyteller--and so on into the tale.Vikram ChandraVikram Chandra writes in theNew York Timesthat the book is "structurally complicated, gruesome, satisfyingly full of harmonies with other tales and illustrative of a variety of Indian responses to life's inexplicable catastrophes."