I was a bit nervous going into this one because I pretty much hated Simmons' Hyperion, which is considered one of his best books (and one of the best sci-fi books in general).

Luckily, this book turned out to be a really good read!

Instead of a love letter to a city, Song of Kali is like a death threat to a city. It's as if Simmons made it with letters sliced out of a magazine and mailed in a box that he took a dump in. Even though this is a work of fiction, the descriptions of Calcutta and its people are so vivid that they really make you wonder if Simmons really has it out for the place. If you are the kind of person who gets racially triggered by images of non-white people doing terrible and disgusting things, then you will not like this book.

Beyond that, this is basically a horror novel. It is a slow burn, and it goes on past the climax a bit too long. However, it is dark and creepy enough to satisfy most horror fans. The atmosphere Simmons creates is palpable, and the characters are well-developed. You really feel for them as they face the terrors that lurk within the pages of this book. Overall, Song of Kali is a great read for those who enjoy horror and are not easily offended.

I still have nightmares from this book, and the romantic and naive desire to visit India has completely vanished.

The vivid descriptions in the book painted a rather terrifying picture of India, shattering my once-idyllic幻想 of the country.

It seems that reality can be so different from what we imagine. What I thought would be a beautiful and exotic adventure has turned into a source of fear and disappointment.

Perhaps this is a lesson for me to be more cautious and realistic when it comes to my dreams and aspirations. Maybe I need to do more research and preparation before blindly following my heart.

Nevertheless, I cannot deny the impact this book has had on me. It has made me question my assumptions and opened my eyes to the harsh realities that exist in the world.

Although my dream of visiting India has been dashed, I still hope to have other opportunities to explore different cultures and places, but this time with a more informed and mature perspective.

Holy crap!

What an incredibly brilliant book this is!

It is truly harrowing, with its intense and deeply affecting content that grabs hold of your emotions and doesn't let go.

The power that this book holds is palpable, as it takes you on a journey through a world that is both captivating and disturbing.

Every page is filled with vivid descriptions and engaging storytelling that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

It's a book that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page, leaving you with a sense of awe and wonder.

Whether you're a fan of fiction or non-fiction, this book is a must-read.

It's a literary masterpiece that will surely go down in history as one of the greatest books of our time.

So, what are you waiting for? Pick up this book today and prepare to be blown away!

I read this entire piece without once taking my eyes off the pages. For the final two-thirds of it, my heart was pounding at an accelerated rate. I was practically vaulting through the pages, desperate to see how this story would ultimately resolve. It's been a long time since a book has held me in such a mesmeric grip. In fact, I think the last book to have captivated me with such force was The Road. That book, like this one, had a way of drawing me in and not letting go until the very end. The characters, the plot, the atmosphere - it all combined to create an experience that was truly unforgettable. I can't wait to see what else this author has in store for us.

I've got several books by Dan Simmons, and this one, "The Song of Kali," was the first book I read.

It's a novel that's extremely hard to comprehend in terms of its genre. It's part Terror and part an Adventure novel. There was something in this book that truly made me sick.

In the beginning, as our protagonist's family arrives at Calcutta, they describe it as a dirty city. Our main characters are sweating with miasma, and everything seems awful. It's quite a bad image. I remember being so sick that I had to re-read those couple of pages several times. It's really quite disgusting. I think I've never felt that way from a novel before or even afterwards.

Now, let's talk about the plot. Luczac and his wife and baby go to Calcutta to find a poet who apparently is writing new things despite being dead for 8 years. If he is alive, where can he be found? They meet Krishna, a local intellectual, who has been asked to assist them by a mutual friend. They also meet the local writers' guild, which denies a meeting between Luczac and Das, the Indian writer.

Luczac and Krishna then meet a man who tells them about a secret society dedicated to Kali, a Hindu goddess of death and destruction. He also reveals that to join the sect, he had to bring a corpse from the river, and that corpse was of Das. Again, Luczac goes to the guild, and this time they let him see the writer. Das is suffering from leprosy and confirms the story they had heard from that man, but Luczac refuses to believe. Then they give him an extensive collection of Das' poetry, which is very different from what he knew. In exchange, Das asks him to bring books of poetry.

As Luczac is drawn into the tale and gets increasingly frightened, he tries to send his wife and child home, but they are unable to do it. Concealing a gun inside a book of poetry given by Krishna, he returns to Das and gives him the books. As he tries to return home, he hears two shots, and the guards knock him out. After a supernatural manifestation of Kali, he escapes only to find that his child was kidnapped.

After days of dead-ends, a couple is caught trying to smuggle jewels hidden within the child, who died of trauma. With their child dead, they return to America, and he destroys the poetry, and their life slowly returns to normal. In the end, we learn that the whispers of the Song of Kali can still be heard.

This book is an evil book but excellent, believe me. When you start to read it, you will not want to stop. It's a book dedicated to an evil side of humanity. Calcutta here has done what Sodom and Gomorrah did to Christianity. It's a really scary book without a happy ending. I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves a horror novel. It's truly excellent. I would rate it 9.5/10.

I'll say that this book was rather short and well written. It contains endless descriptions of Calcutta and its overpowering smell that reaches the high heaven. Seriously, Brown described it as a putrid sort of place filled with lepers, filthy, and the vileness of a third world country. This makes anyone reading this book not even consider going there to visit its rich culture. He might be right, but it's not fun to read such things when there is hardly anything going on in the book.

There was not much action going on. The characters are OK but at times quite stupid in their actions, especially the main character. And for something that I thought would be explored more in depth, the ending was a letdown. Even with the big reveal, it was still a letdown.

Up until a 200-page mark, nothing really happens. It was all about going out, trying to set meetings with people, and a man telling us a story that was supposed to be frightening but was everything but. The Kali scenes were awesome but should have been explored a lot more.

Overall, it was a fun read but not a thrilling one. It had its moments, like the vivid descriptions of Calcutta and the interesting Kali scenes. However, the lack of action and the underdeveloped characters and ending made it fall short of being a truly great book. It's a book that you might enjoy reading once, but it's not one that you'll likely pick up again.

Before coming to Kolkata, I participated in demonstrations against nuclear weapons. Now I dream of nuclear clouds in the form of huge mushrooms rising above the city. I see buildings melting into seas of glass. I see paved streets flowing like rivers of lava, and real rivers boiling in clouds of steam. I see the outlines of people, jumping like burned insects, like disgusting moths, twitching and splashing on the blood-red background of the final destruction.

The city is Kolkata. The dreams are not unpleasant.

This is a very good book, surely the best by Simmons. A horrifying mix between the real poverty, stink, misery and filth of Kolkata and the mystery of a cult to the goddess of death. It is written extremely realistically, making you live with the main hero, think, feel, see and breathe with him. The description of Kolkata, and from there of all of India with its caste systems, public services for collecting corpses, religious cults - colorful, noisy, filthy, cruel, bloody.

The main hero goes to Kolkata with his wife (an Indian) and his daughter (still a baby) to interview some dead poet who turns out to be alive and well. As he follows his path, Luckac gets involved with the cult of the goddess Kali, which perhaps the poet has experienced. And then things get complicated, and then very complicated.

Simmons is very clever in leaving the decision of whether the manifestations of Kali are reality or a good human invention entirely to the reader, while at the same time firmly stating his position for the former.

The book is read in one breath, leaving you at the end shaken and with a renewed faith in the evil in people. It is a must-read.

This particular work has one of the most spine-chilling reveals in the entire realm of fantastic fiction. It is truly a moment that can send shivers down your spine.

However, it is also rife with the idiosyncrasies that drive me absolutely nuts about Simmons. These little quirks and oddities seem to pop up throughout the story and just grate on my nerves.

Now, this is a very personal dislike, mind you. In fact, I really want to give this book 4 stars. There is something about it that still manages to draw me in and keep me engaged.

But I have to be honest, I have a strong feeling that Dan Simmons is a real son of a bitch. It seems that all of his protagonists are just unbearable. They have these flaws and characteristics that make it hard to root for them or even like them.

And then there is the issue of racism. It is present in the story in a way that makes me uncomfortable and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's a real shame because otherwise, the book has a lot of potential.

Due to a longstanding affinity for horror fiction and film, I consider myself pretty jaded to and desensitized by the morbid, the creepy, and the fucked up.

The scars inflicted by these kinds of things on my psyche are old and pale, and don't hurt on even the coldest days. That said, every time I finish a Simmons novel, there's always a few fresh traumas that I have to deal with.

Even stuff that you wouldn't think would be very disturbing, like Hyperion, cosmically scarred me. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself...it's like the most creepy masochistic relationship ever.

The relationship I have with Simmons' books is seriously some Last Tango in Paris shit, with his bibliography as Marlon Brando and myself as a much less attractive Maria Schneider.

Song of Kali was Simmons' first novel, but his style is already surprisingly gelled and mature. There's no first-book clumsiness or hesitation here, just 300 pages of atmospheric, visceral tension and horror.

The story proper concerns one Mr. Robert Luczak, an editor at the literary magazines Other Voices and Harper's. Recently, some new work by the purportedly-dead Indian poet M. Das has surfaced, and Robert's editor wants him to fly down to Calcutta (Kolkata) and find out if there's anything to it.

Sounds easy enough, but when Luczak lands in Calcutta, he finds himself in a hellish world of oppressive heat, grinding poverty, and an intense general sense of malevolence.

Most of the people he meets are similarly weird and creepy. All bets are off on their intentions, and the sense of being surrounded by unreadable but generally unsettling people perpetuates the novel.

Anyone who's been to a foreign country that doesn't speak your language will be familiar with the generally uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what the FUCK anyone is saying, and that's extrapolated here to a crushing extent.

While I'm on the setting, I might as well talk about Simmons' painting of Calcutta and its many, many denizens. To say it's unflattering would be a massive understatement, and I'm sure that this book has been called xenophobic or even Indophobic.

That said, I really don't think that Simmons is just being an American asshole in this; as this is a first person narrative, these are specifically Luczak's impressions, and as the reader will find out, he certainly has reasons to hate the city.

Simmons just seems too smart and cognizant of the history and humanity of other cultures to cavalierly write them off as inherently evil or misguided.

It's just a great setting for intense, sustained urban horror. You never hear people crying about stories set in supergross Victorian London or anything like that, so what the fuck?

It's just an unfortunate fact that parts of India are overcrowded, poor as shit, oppressed by the caste system, and dirty as hell due to rampant open defecation and pollution.

A maddening sense of ambiguity is sustained throughout the entire novel. There are no easy resolutions or explanations here, and some of the events in the story are just as senseless and haunting as those in real life.

I'm not even sure if there was any fantastical content in this book, and it won a World Fantasy Award! A lot of it could definitely be rationally explained (but of course is not), which only adds to the disturbing mystery and atmosphere of the novel.

I'm hardly an expert, but the content concerning Hinduism (most specifically the titular Goddess) seemed well-researched and thoroughly vivid.

Simmons' obsession with all things literary is also already present here, as a lot of the novel concerns poetry and the people that write it.

The sustained focus on literary business and poetry only added to the realistic feeling of the novel and thusly gave added impact to the scenes where Luczak has completely left the mundane world of magazine work and entered an altogether alien and nasty plane.

Altogether, an impressive first novel, even for one of the authors that has quickly become one of my favorites.

Anyone interested in a dark-as-night horror story with a well-drawn protagonist in a novel setting should check this out.

Since I mentioned him, I should probably say a few words about Robert--I'm not sure that I ever liked the man, to be honest; he has a serious anger problem and just generally can be a dick, which are two things that I really fucking hate in human beings.

But I didn't have to like him for him to be drawn as a realistic character, and that he is.

One second he's being super sweet to his adorable baby Victoria (I loved the scenes with her, they had a vivid sense of tenderness and love), and the next he's dealing with intense bouts of rage induced by the smallest of stimuli.

Unfortunately, this kind of personality is not alien to humanity, and I applaud Simmons for drawing a character that wasn't just some bland, nice Anytown, USA average Joe.

It certainly adds to the horrifying realism of the story. An easy recommendation for Simmons fans and a still-pretty-easy recommendation to horror/suspense fans.

Dan the Man Simmons made a helluva debut.

His work truly left a lasting impression. However, the ending was rather bleak. It was like a punch in the gut.

Ay Caramba! It made you wonder what could have been.

The story had so much potential, but that ending just took it in a different direction.

It was a bit of a shock, really.

But perhaps that's what makes Simmons' work so unique.

He's not afraid to take risks and go against the grain.

Despite the bleak ending, you can't help but admire his creativity and boldness.

It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

Overall, it was a memorable debut that will surely have people talking for a long time.

The stench of Calcutta seems to waft right off the pages in this vivid and captivating tale of an American family's visit to India.

It is truly a mesmerizing read that has the power to transport the reader into a world filled with mystery and horror.

I firmly believe that this novel deservedly won the Bram Stoker award for best first novel.

The story of the body is so intricately woven and disturbing that it will surely stay with me for a long, long time.

For any horror fan out there, I highly recommend this book. It is a must-read that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

Prepare to be enthralled by the vivid descriptions, the engaging plot, and the unforgettable characters.

This is a horror novel that will leave a lasting impression and have you craving more.

So, don't miss out on this amazing literary work. Grab a copy and let the stench of Calcutta and the horrors within its pages consume you.

This is supposed to be the scariest book ever.

It is truly scary in certain spots, maintaining a rich tone that is simply dripping with dread.

It has such an impact that it makes you want to never visit India.

However, in my opinion, it wasn't all that scary.

I think the reason for this is that all the scary things described in the book are confined to Calcutta.

As soon as the characters return to America, the sense of threat completely disappears.

Perhaps if the story had continued to unfold with elements of horror in other parts of the world or had a more sustained sense of danger throughout, it would have lived up to its reputation as the scariest book ever.

But as it stands, while it has its moments of fright, it ultimately falls short of being truly terrifying.

Nevertheless, it does give one pause when thinking about traveling to certain areas, especially those with a reputation for being a bit more on the mysterious or dangerous side.

Overall, it's an interesting read that manages to create a certain atmosphere of unease, but not quite the bone-chilling horror that one might have expected.