On The Nightstand – Song Of Kali – 7/9/2018

I had no plan to pick this book up – I think it actually found me.  I mentioned in my July Releases post that this was a light month and that I was looking for options to add to my TBR pile.  I’d already started the one true release that I’d selected for July – S.M. Stirling’s “Black Chamber” – and I was enjoying it.

I actually blame Amazon for what happened next.  I’m browsing my Amazon featured selections early last week and I come across this old U.K. hardcover edition of Dan Simmons’ “Song Of Kali”.  I’ve read one of Simmons’ books – “Carrion Comfort” – and enjoyed it enough (read “was creeped out enough”) to tag him as a “Followed” author.  As a purchaser of hardcover editions, Amazon’s algorithm naturally serves this up and I purchase it despite the price.  It arrived pretty quickly and I decide to read the first chapter.  The next thing you know, I’ve put “Black Chamber” aside and I’m devouring this one instead.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Horror is not my genre – possibly because too much of ordinary, everyday life these days has more than a whiff of horror to it – possibly because so much appalling information these days is delivered to us directly via the 24 hour news stations, the internet and social media.  Too much of the stuff I’ve read from this genre seems to be a bit unremarkable – as though real life has raised the bar to such an extent that it becomes hard for authors to find a way to chill an audience?

Maybe that’s why I enjoyed this book so much – even given the fact that it was written in 1985, Simmons found a way to make this horrifying in a durable way – and he does it without slathering on the supernatural.  Instead, he plays with some pretty ubiquitous, atavistic anxieties and fears.

Here’s the first – and anyone who’s had an expat experience – who’s lived for any amount of time outside their own country might relate to it.  Simmons takes a very naive, highly educated, middle class couple with their baby and drops them – without appreciable support – into an unfamiliar, intimidating, extremely complex foreign culture.

I’ve lived as both a government and a corporate ex-pat and I’d be the first to admit that both experiences are somewhat bubble-wrapped.  You have colleagues at work and ex-pat friends whose children all attend the same American school, you have support structures – both locally and back in your home country, you’re well compensated, your housing is provided – your sponsors make it as easy as possible.  Even with all of that, there’s a degree of stress and anxiety associated with the experience that sometimes becomes hard to manage.  The simplest things – things that you used to do without thinking – become more challenging and you feel like you’re expending far more energy every day than was ever the case at home.

Simmons captures that feeling as he describes the experiences of the Luczaks during their relatively brief visit to India.  While they have people that are ostensibly helping them, none of them are trustworthy or what they’d expected and they’re basically cast adrift in a country and society that is bombarding them with situations and messages and experiences they are inherently unrelateable.  The sense of stress they’re experiencing is tangible and you see it degrading their ability to make good, rational decisions.

The second theme Simmons drives into the narrative is a sense of horror – not related to the supernatural – but to the sheer, overwhelming poverty that surrounds the Luczaks and the sense that life is of so little value.  The vision of decay and filth and death that Simmons portrays creates a feeling of horror completely independent of the supernatural elements of the story.  I’ve traveled to India a number of times for business over the course of my professional life and, while I found it extremely overstated and representative of an earlier time, the atmosphere that Simmons creates was still reflective of things I’d seen and experienced.  It is very hard for someone from a developed country to adjust their perspective to accept as normal what is almost certainly the normal course of daily life for so many people.  By way of example, I found it profoundly disturbing to repeatedly have babies pressed against the windshield of my car by infant beggars.

Having said all that, I do want to make sure that I’m not misunderstood.  Every unpleasant shock that India delivers to the system is counterbalanced by an amazing, rewarding experience or a beautiful element of the culture.  For purposes of this story, however, Simmons very effectively uses the negatives to create a sense of horror and disregard for the value of human life that do just as much – possibly more – than the supernatural elements he introduces to make the narrative uncomfortable and disturbing.

Finally, Simmons manages to anchors the horror of the story not in the possibility of a living Goddess of Death guiding events – something that is more hinted at than confirmed – the one concrete appearance of Kali taking place at a time when Robert Luczak is under the influence of a behavior altering drug – but in the cruelty and remarkable heartlessness of the humans who worship her.  The people are the true monsters in this story and not Kali herself.  By way of example, the horror embedded in the story’s final tragedy – the death of the Luczak’s child – is cast as a purely human evil – an attempt on the part of someone to use her corpse as a vehicle for smuggling gemstones out of the country.

Short to long – so much of the horror in the story exists independent of the suggestion of supernatural influence and it comes at you from multiple sources.  I found the book to be particularly impactful – in a way that few of the more recent entries in the Genre manage to be.  It’s a book that – for me – stands the test of time and offers up the kind of experience that more horror stories should.