Song of Kali

Last night I finished reading Song of Kali by Dan Simmons. Published in 1985, the book tells the story of American poet and intellectual Robert Luczack who is hired by Harper's magazine to travel to Calcutta and investigate the case of a reknowned Indian poet who has reappeared under mysterious circumstances after having been thought dead for eight years. Travelling to Calcutta with his wife and baby daughter, Luczack is horrified and fascinated by the poverty and casual violence that he witnesses on the streets. Beginning his investigation he discovers that the poet was in some way linked to a powerful and bloodthristy cult dedicated to the worship of Kali, Goddess of Death. It's a pretty gruesome book, and it does benefit from having a really strong creepy atmosphere throughout. It won the 1986 World Fantasy Award.

I was also reading a couple of stories from Best New Horror 20. The first one, "Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told" by Peter Crowther was a kind of sweet and funny Twilight Zone-style story in which an elderly one-time newspaper reporter goes to visit his favourite bar for a drink with his friends, despite the fact that he is dead. In "It Runs Beneath the Surface" by Simon Strantzas, a tired commuter in the inner-city finds himself pursued by a malevolent force hiding in the shadows in the Underground system. In "These Things We Have Always Known" by Lynda E. Rucker, a sculptor in a strange small American town discovers the source of the town's strangeness, and in "Through the Cracks" a young woman from London, visiting her sister in Newcastle, pays a call on her ex-boyfriend who is obsessed by the idea that some powerful malevolent entity is trying to get into our world through cracks.

Today was yet another quiet day at work, and it was really dull as usual.