The Song of Kali (Paperback Book)

by Dan Simmons

O terrible wife of Siva
You are chewing the flesh;
O terrible wife of Siva,
Your tongue is drinking the blood,
O dark Mother! O unclad Mother.

Calcutta, a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the foetid 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 a New York magazine 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 before long Luczak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare... it is rumoured that the poet has been brought back to life, in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.