Robert Luczak, an American poet and editor, flies to Calcutta with his Indian wife and their infant daughter to recover new work by a Bengali poet long presumed dead. The assignment reads as simple magazine business. Instead the city closes around him, hot and vast and thick with rumor, and the trail bends toward a cult that worships Kali, goddess of death and destruction. Dan Simmons builds his first novel on slow dread rather than shock, letting Calcutta itself carry the menace, a place his narrator comes to believe has stopped being merely a city and turned into something older and hungrier.