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

Robert Luczak has been hired by a New York magazine 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 before long Luczak's routine assignment turns into a nightmare...it is rumoured that the poet has been brought back to life, in a bloody and grisly ceremony of human sacrifice.