Well, the story hinges around the fact that at the end of every bridge-building, Bengalis used to have an elaborate religious ceremony." 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. 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? The character development in Song of Kali is good without taking centre stage. Each one is very realistic, with the help of effective dialogue, with a good bit of depth. This definitely helped to add a sense of realism to the narrative that was essential to what Simmons was trying to achieve.

But any review of this book would be incomplete without a mention of how the author paints the landscape of 1970's Calcutta, which is a character in itself. Simmons spent a few days there to research the place and it shows in his vivid descriptions. He's certainly not there to portray a beautiful picture of India, this is a horror novel after all, and I was fully immersed in the evil underbelly of this important city. Its bleak and nasty and fits the tone of the story perfectly. I'm pretty sure he hasn't endeared himself to the Indian tourist board. 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 The South Asia of that period of hopelessness has been replaced by a vibrant, expansive India (though let us see what the recession brings) and the despair has shifted to a declining West.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.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. 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. 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."

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. 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.Yeah," said Abe and rotated his cigar again. He took no notice of my little performance. Abe Bronstein expected his former poetry editor to know his Greek. "Well, the only word that could describe Calcutta to me then…or now… was miasma. I can't even hear one word without thinking of the other." According to the Indian dialect you do not call a person Jayaprakesh. You call him Jayaprakash or Jayaprakas but not Jayaprakesh !

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. 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.

There's much of violence and its cost running throughout Simmons' work (another reason I love him), but it appears in myriad forms. And always from a different genre direction. Historical fiction, urban fantasy, hard sci-fi, horror, historical horror, whodunnit, poetry, mythos, and whatever else works.