Dan Simmons is known for his massive novels. This is not one of them. Why? Well, it's rare that you'll find a horror author who started out their career with a massive tome as their debut novel. Why? Because money, that's why.

Straub had Julia, King had Carrie, McCammon had Baal, and Simmons had this one. What do they all have in common? They're all debuts that are around 300 pages long from authors known to write gargantuan books. Horror is a risky business. Publishers are frugal when it comes to taking a chance on my poor, beloved genre. No one wants to push out a 600-plus-page flop for a debut and lose their shirts over it. Longer novels are notoriously hard to market, and almost impossible to find reviews for. To succeed as a horror author in the literary community, you should have at least two novels under your belt before you reach into the realm of the Tome/Doorstop, and one of those two novels should have won some kind of award: a Stoker award is good; a World Fantasy award is best. Then, and only then, will Penguin Random House or HarperCollins allow you to publish that epic horror novel concerning shapeshifting, post-apocalyptic ferrets hellbent on creating a great, stinking plane known as Musk-World, wherein a band of quirky heroes must defeat High Lord Fear-It and bring a jasmine-and-vanilla-Glade-scented freshness back to their once proud land!

Song of Kali can be mistaken for a xenophobic outing. I guess, anyway. If you actually read and digest the text, I believe you'll find the exact opposite. Because there are several places where Simmons ruminates on the ugliness of Calcutta. But there are just as many sections where Simmons riffs on the nasty underbelly of America, too. In one such section, two men are discussing how Calcutta isn't so much different from some cities in America: Flint, Michigan being one such place. A woman chimes in that there is a supernatural evil overtaking Calcutta; that, at its heart, the city is evil. The local laughs it off and explains that the atrocities found in Calcutta are no different from the atrocities found in America. How exactly is a book xenophobic when it shows both sides of a coin? Are we to say that Simmons is intolerant of India AND America? If so, what land does Simmons favorite? It is Simmons's unbiased approach to this story that I appreciate more than anything else. He could have taken the Indians-and-Arabs-are-all-evil! approach, but he did not. Instead, he showed that any place can be evil, no matter the social order, and that India's class system is no better or worse than America's own class-based system. It is blind faith in any god or religion that Simmons is attacking. The power of indoctrination.

I have a hard time reading Stephen King's Pet Sematary because of Gage's fate. This book has a similar scene that is all the more soul-rending due to its brevity. The scene of which I speak could have been handled numerous ways, but the way in which Simmons handles it is nothing short of genius. Still, due to this scene, I'll likely not reread this book. When I got to this crushing chapter, I was sitting in a doctor's office, waiting to hear the bad news about my back (I ended up having my fifth back surgery a week after completing this novel), and upon reading this scene, muttered out loud, "Oh, fucking hell." The people in the waiting room didn't appreciate my outburst. I apologized, but I wasn't really sorry. Because I felt that "Oh, fucking hell" was the perfect descriptor for my feelings at that moment. The father in me couldn't handle the scene. "Oh, fucking hell" was my way of coping without crying in public.

The scurrying-Kali-in-the-dark sequence is disturbing as hell, too. I'll not forget that one for years to come. I don't quite know how Simmons pulled off that scene. It's a true mystery, that level of atmospheric mastery. Such scenes authors spend entire careers hoping to accomplish, but Simmons did it in his debut. Bravo.

Overall, I think Simmons knew what he was doing here. He created a pretentious poet of a main character, one who muses that Stephen King novels are "trashy", even though King and Simmons have a great respect for one another. They've even blurbed each other's novels on more than one occasion. To attach the MC's viewpoints and xenophobia to the author is to ignore the rules of fiction. This story is fiction, and a good author can inhabit anyone and see all sides of a story without subscribing to those beliefs. I mean, are we to believe that Simmons thinks it is possible to reanimate the dead for the purposes of writing a poem in the hope of pleasing a multi-armed goddess? No. Because he and we know it's fiction. If you can ignore the blatant racism of H.P. Lovecraft, a racism that runs rampant throughout both his life and his work, then you should be able to get through this novel without frying a circuit. Or maybe not. To each their own, I suppose.

In summation: A brief excursion to a truly disturbing place. It's nice to see how Simmons has grown since his debut, and I feel I have a greater respect for his journey now that I've read where he started. Three stars because it's not something I would read again, but I do not regret reading it.

Final Judgment: Divisive.

Synopsis: Calcutta: a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction. Robert Luczak has been hired by Harper's to find a noted Indian poet who has reappeared, under strange circumstances, years after he was thought dead. But nothing is simple in Calcutta and Lucsak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare when he learns that the poet is rumored to have been brought back to life in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.

*****

I always feel bad when I dislike a novel that is as original as this one. It is pretty hard to find works like Song of Kali, especially in the era in which it was written -- that era being the mid-80s, i.e. when horror fiction was at its peak in popularity. Horror novels were *it* but, sadly, a lot of books written in that genre then were barely more than pedantic Stephen King rip-offs. 

If anything, this novel is definitely not a Stephen King rip-off. 

As I said, this book is original and was unlike anything else I've ever read. Dan Simmons's first novel is a roaring entrance into the game, and it doesn't really ever let up for the entirety of its 300 pages. I'm a big fan of Dan Simmons -- Summer of Night is one of my favorite novels ever -- but this book, despite its originality, doesn't quite show the skills Simmons would hone only a couple of years down the road. However, this is his first novel and I wouldn't expect it to be perfect. 

What, you may ask, is my beef with this novel? Actually, I only had a problem with a couple of things, but those things -- the protagonist/narrator as well as, say, every other character -- are pretty big. This book is told in first-person, so all of the events are witnessed through the eyes of our main character, Robert Luczak, an aspiring poet and staffer for a magazine who has taken his wife and infant daughter with him on assignment to Calcutta, India. This guy, for lack of better descriptive terms, is an arrogant, self-absorbed asshole. And for no reason, too! His wife is calm and put together and tries to help him, but he constantly treats her like a child. He is the sole reason this family of three has horrible things happen to them in India because he consistently does stupid things that he acknowledges is stupid... but he does them anyway. I won't say more because I would hate to spoil anything. '

As well as Robert, all of the other characters are annoying, but they're just annoying because I don't know enough about any of them to feel any other way. They're hastily-drawn ciphers whose only role (in most cases) is to keep the story going. When they suffer, I don't really care because Simmons does not offer enough backstory or details about these people he's brought to the page. I typically enjoy Simmons's characters because they are almost always written in such detail and given so much life... but I guess he hadn't learned how to create realistic people yet. I dunno. 

I'm going to keep this review short because I'm sort of annoyed at this book -- mostly because I wanted to like it. It won the World Fantasy Award in '86. It's often touted as one of the scariest novels ever by so many horror fans online. It has such a following... and I don't know why. In my opinion, it wasn't even all that scary. Sure, there were several chilling moments but in most cases the author substituted actual fright with mere gross-out, which might work for some readers... but it definitely doesn't work for this guy. It was a quick read and, like I said, it's highly original. If anything, Simmons uses the location of Calcutta to his advantage, getting all of the mileage possible out of the concept he has created. In addition, the last couple of chapters are pretty bittersweet, mixing horror, fright, and suffering in a way Simmons would often do in his later, bigger novels. The final chapters is where the novel shines most. 

All in all, Song Of Kali wasn't a bad read, but it wasn't particularly great either. It was a decent way to kick off my October reading, but I doubt I'll ever go back and read it again. 3 stars. 

This book is very unsettling so far. Dan Simmons never disappoints. 

A 300-page diatribe against Calcutta, which city evidently offended Simmons at some point.

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.

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.

One character, the college kid who gets the plot rolling, tells Bobby a story about the worshippers of the evil goddess Kali. The story starts on Page 62 and ends on Page 111. Bobby doesn't applaud at the end of it, despite the fact that it's a bravura performance, complete with backstory, chapters, and narrative arc. Perhaps he withholds his approbation because he knows the story could have been drastically shortened, and even demonstrates this when he later condenses the boy's 3-hour monologue to 10 minutes in relating it to his wife.

Very little actually happens in this story, though it is filled from end to end with repeated descriptions of the rampant squalor of Calcutta. Bobby decides this is because the people are evil. Makes it easier, I suppose, for him to feel nothing for them. He dreams of it disappearing in nuclear fire. For him, it's a pleasant dream.

Simmons seems less interested here in plot than Lovecraftian dread. Lovecraft, however, didn't write 300-page novels. I think there's a reason for that.