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Book synopsis

City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British colonial period with its culture clashes and simmering unrest, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell. At the heart of the book is an itinerant teller of ghost tales called Brahm Kathuwala, an old man wearing amulets around his neck and a silk top hat with peacock plumes. As Siegel follows him all over north India, Brahm's life story is revealed through countless interlocking tales. We learn of his two mothers - one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant and his battles against her demonic possession. We come to understand the strange life of this man who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears.

Book details

Book category Books in English Fiction & related items Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

• Full title: City of Dreadful Night
• Subtitle: A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India
• Author: Lee Siegel
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• EAN: 9780226756899
• ISBN: 0226756890
• ID: 04549365
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Weight: 316 g
• Dimensions: 216 × 140 × 16 mm
• Date of publishing: 31. October 1995

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