Calcutta—a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, clasped in the fetid embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying centre is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction.

Robert Luczak—hired by Harper's, has come to Calcutta with his wife and child 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 Luczak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare of terror when he learns that the poet is reputed to have been brought back to life in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.

Luczak just wants to interview the poet and take his family home. Instead he is caught in the dark design of forces ancient and inexorable. The Song of Kali has just begun...