James Nicoll Reviews

Dan Simmons’ 1985 Song of Kali is a World-Fantasy-Award-winning horror novel.

Post‑9/11, Simmons outed himself as a virulent Islamophobe. Was this a reaction to second-hand trauma or did it bring out something that had been lurking there all along, unnoticed? Or did it cast light on something that had been obvious from the beginning? Consider Dan Simmon’s debut novel, Song of Kali.

Calcutta, city of pure, unredeemable evil!¹

The protagonist is an American author/editor, Robert Luczak. He is a respected writer married to an exceptionally beautiful Indian woman, Amita. Amita is fluent in a number of languages. This makes Robert the ideal candidate for a very special assignment on behalf of Harper’s Magazine.

Respected poet M. Das vanished eight years earlier. Das is presumed dead, perhaps a crime victim. Now evidence has emerged that Das is alive. Robert’s task: travel to perilous Calcutta, and with Amita’s assistance as translator, find Das and secure a copy of his latest work, to be published in Harper’s. Robert, his wife and baby travel to Calcutta.

Calcutta is large, dilapidated, and densely populated. Many of its inhabitants are abjectly poor. Robert finds the city repellent. A nightmare. But Robert, unaware that he is starring in a horror novel, persists in his search.

It doesn’t take long to find Das. It’s almost as though dark forces bent on global destruction wanted Robert to succeed in his quest, because the writer that Robert finds is a decaying entity in thrall to a monstrous evil.

(This is where I stop to point out that in addition to finding Das, Robert also discovers that the city is devoted to the dread goddess Kali, that it is home to horrifying cults, necromancy, and evil of all kinds. Simmons’ version of Hinduism is such a grotesque caricature that one must assume that he did no real research at all. It’s as if a Hindu writer were to pen a work about Catholicism based on the pamphlets of Jack Chick.)

Robert does have a few qualms about the assignment. No worry! The cult to which Das belongs has ways of keeping him on track. Ways that aren’t so kind to his baby daughter.

~oOo~

My copy of this book is the November 1986 Tor mass-market paperback edition. Clearly Tor had great hopes for this novel, as it has a fancy, embossed cover, the kind of flourish to which marketing budgets will no longer stretch. It’s a well-made artifact that hasn’t fallen apart; its pages haven’t turned yellow and crumbled. Regrettably, that’s the only positive thing I can say about Song of Kali.

The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense if we assume that the cult wants to get Das published in the West, thus spreading Kali’s evil message. There would be many other less twisty ways to do that. But that may not be the point of the sketchy plot. What might be in play here is something noted by TV writer John Rogers: many audiences don’t care if the plot makes sense, as long as the sequence of events hits the right notes along the way to the unearned conclusion. In this case, the events of the book add up to a song about evil Calcutta and its evil people.

Simmons is in no way subtle about his hatred of Calcutta. The novel kicks off with this tirade:

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist. Some cities are too wicked to be suffered. Calcutta is such a place. Before Calcutta I would have laughed at such an idea. Before Calcutta I did not believe in evil — certainly not as a force separate from the actions of men. Before Calcutta I was a fool.

After the Romans had conquered the city of Carthage, they killed the men, sold the women and children into slavery, pulled down the great buildings, broke up the stones, burned the rubble, and salted the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again. That is not enough for Calcutta. Calcutta should be expunged.

Before Calcutta I took part in marches against nuclear weapons. Now I dream of nuclear mushroom clouds rising above a city. I see buildings melting into lakes of glass. I see paved streets flowing like rivers of lava and real rivers boiling away in great gouts of steam. I see human figures dancing like burning insects, like obscene praying mantises sputtering and bursting against a fiery red background of total destruction.

The city is Calcutta. The dreams are not unpleasant.

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist.

Simmon’s Calcutta is overpopulated, filthy, violent, diseased, crime-ridden, cult-ridden, and eeeeeeeeevil. Simmons hammers on that theme over and over. From time-to-time Simmons seems to remember that perhaps an unending stream of spittle-flinging invective about all the ways in which a densely populated Asian city fails to please a white American might come across as a little bit racist and inserts mention of a positive aspect of the local culture. This is almost invariably followed with some horrifying detail about Calcutta, past or present.

I have seen second-hand assertions (that I cannot verify) that Simmons visited Calcutta. If so, the Calcutta he visited was the Calcutta of the 1970s, one that had recently suffered neglect, as well as a massive and poorly-managed influx of newcomers. I should also note that science fiction, fantasy, and horror aren’t too keen on cities², especially large cities, or persons of colour. Indian megalopolises therefore are likely to be regarded with disdain by your average spec fic author. Also, India in particular has been singled out by various Western pundits and writers as the Asian nation most likely to collapse into famine and civil war. Still… Song of Kali stands out for sheer unmotivated hatred and xenophobia.

The book was well received. This edition has glowing blurbs from diverse sources: F. Paul Wilson, Locus, and Edward Bryant³. Song also won a World Fantasy Award⁴. There was obviously an audience for whom the bigotry⁵ of the novel was not an issue. One might go so far as to say for them the bigotry was entirely invisible. However, at the same time, a Usenet denizen named Douglas Muir pointed out (at great length) on rec.arts.sf.written that the novel was irredeemably racist. I suspect that aspect was not lost on Indian readers, as well.

The book remains in print to this day, so people are still buying it.

Song of Kali is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: I know that the official spelling of the city changed (from an Anglicized form back to a more original version), but not only am I using the spelling from the novel, it’s for the best to make the distinction between Simmons’ Calcutta and India’s Kolkata as clear as possible.

Some etymologies assert that the city is named after Kali.

2: CBC’s horror radio show Nightfall (no relation to the Asimov
story) is an interesting exception, in that its writers viewed small
towns as supernatural deathtraps. I assume most of the show’s writers were from Toronto.

3: Bryant’s words were sufficiently ambiguous that I tracked down the book in which they first appeared, the Newman and Jones anthology of reviews, Horror: The 100 Best Books. In context, Bryant’s comments were praise.

4: At the time, the World Fantasy Award statuette was a bust of H. P. Lovecraft. That was extremely apt for this novel.

5: When I was working at Publishers Weekly, the powers-that-be preferred the term ​“problematic,” which was not as likely to get them sued as writing ​“bigoted” or ​“racist” or ​“bat-shit insane.”