Wow, have you ever started reading a book that you thought was going to tell one story, but then was completely different from what you expected?  This just happened to me with the book Song of Kali by Dan Simmons.  For a long time now I’ve been a huge Dan Simmons fan and promoter, my feeling being that his work is not given enough credit amongst the book loving community.

Sure, he is a bestseller, and he gets wonderful reviews, but his name doesn’t seem to be at the front of the line when it comes to talking about great novelist, nor do I ever really see any real promotion of his work in the bookstores around me.  In fact, this lack of promotion has prevented me from anticipating new releases by him because the first time I see the book is when it is set out on the shelf, whereas other author’s new releases are talked about and noted with Coming Soon posters.  Now, maybe this is just a local problem, but if it isn’t I think I have a theory on why it happens.  Most authors have a genera they fit into like a glove and which booksellers like to use in their promotions.  This isn’t the case with Dan Simmons.  His books fit anywhere and can often be found in multiple sections of the bookstore, something which can make locating and advertising his work difficult.  Sure, he has his horror novels, several of which sit alongside Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and F. Paul Wilson, but he also has historical novels like The Terror and Drood, which might sound like horror stories, but aren’t despite some of the horrific elements within, and novels like the Hyperion series which are pure fantasy and are often found on a shelf alongside Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series or Tolken’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Joe Kurtz novels that are crime / mystery and look nice sitting between Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books and John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers books.  Furthermore mixing these novels together and putting them on one shelf can be disastrous, because then people expect them to be something they are not and will become disappointed, something which I have seen happen with this author time and time again, especially with the Hyperion books which are sometimes placed in the horror section.  For me it isn’t a problem because I pretty much love every genera equally, but get a horror fan that despises fantasy, and whoa, they are not going to be happy when they start reading that book.  

Song of Kali is another good example.  I first picked this book up in the fantasy section about six months ago and read the a short blurb that said the story was of an American man fighting to save his family in the foulest most crime ridden city of the world, a city which I thought was made up and part of some future fantasy we might expect to see down the road -- my mind not realizing that when they said the name of the city, Calcutta, that they actually meant the book took place in Calcutta, India in the 1970s.  Unfortunately I did not buy the book at the time because I wasn’t feeling all that well and didn’t want to stand in line -- the gastrological waterslide must have been having a ‘slide for free’ day because all the food I had eaten earlier started to line up for the ride while standing in that section.  I did go back to buy it a few days later, but it was gone.  A few weeks later I found it again, this time in the horror section, but again I didn’t buy it because I had gone in for a specific reason and was already leaving with five more books than I had planned on buying.  A few months later and Christmas arrived and what do you know, the book was one of many that I opened, and this time around the cover mentioned that it was the first novel by Dan Simmons ever published, one that marketed it as a horror classic sure to scare the pants off anyone that read it.  So, not wanting to waste any time, I read it, my mind thinking it was a horror / fantasy blend that took place in a futuristic America.  Wrong.  This book belongs in the mystery / thriller section and shouldn’t be classified as a horror story because it is more of an adventure / mystery tale, one which sees an American man going to Calcutta, India to find out why a poet who was thought dead has suddenly resurfaced.  While there, he sees first hand what a dump the place is, something which I already knew thanks to some people I met from India -- people who were criticized by an American kid at my college for saying negative things about such a wonderful culture (the kid himself had never been to India whereas the two people had lived there, hum, who should I believe?).  Furthermore the man runs afoul of some Kali worshipping sect who may have been responsible for bringing the poet back to life, but don’t want anyone to know about it or their secret rituals, something which eventually caused serious trouble for the American man and his family.  

Not what I expected at all, though I wasn’t disappointed.

The novel was really good, just not marketed correctly, which is one of the reasons I keep hearing people say it isn’t a good horror novel, because it isn’t scary.  I don’t think it was meant to be, however, and people’s expectations that it should be are causing them to miss how wonderful this novel really is.  The same sort of thing could have happened if Indian Johns and Temple of Doom had been marketed as a horror movie.  Sure, it sounds like it could be a horror movie, and has some scary scenes in it, but if people went into it with no idea of what it was about and then were expecting something like Halloween or The Haunting, they would be disappointed because it is an action adventure story.  That’s what happens here.  This is an action adventure story with some horrific elements.  So, if you want a really great story to read, one that gives a really disturbing image of a overpopulated polluted crime ridden city in India, one that has a few gross, frightening, and mind boggling scenes, I strongly suggest you buy this book.  If you want something scary, however, something that is pure horror, then I suggest you grab his novel Summer of Night instead.  That one was a fabulous read as well, one of my all time favorites.