Kathe Koja
Extremities

"[Her] prose reads like a collaboration between Clive Barker and William S. Burroughs." — Library Journal

In the hypnotic, psychological landscape of Kathe Koja, people pushed to extremes of endurance — physical and emotional — enter outer-edge-of-the-envelope states of mind and being. The seventeen stories of Extremities shine an eerie light on the netherworld of artistic exploration and insanity, and the slippery slope into perversity — sexual and violent. They explore encounters with the unexplainable and the bizarre; old fashioned obsession and vengeance with consequences twisted and unique; intersecting paths of the living and the dead. Koja's language is gorgeously descriptive of each delicate sensation, prosaic and grotesque: every sense is exquisitely evoked from the visual to the tactile, the auditory to the olfactory. Skins creep and crawl, sounds rattle and hum — entire stories shiver with her simmering intensity.

Frequently Koja's people are betrayed by their own imaginations — artists controlled by their muses, women dominated by their fantasy lovers, ordinary Joes bewitched by subversive inner voices and inexplicably endowed with unwanted powers. In "Disquieting Muse," an art therapist is unwillingly drawn to a blank young woman's sexually explicit drawings. His well-ordered life becomes disrupted by these vibrant disturbed pictures until they metastasize and consume him. "Angels in Love" starts out with some straightforward jealousy and curiosity about the sexual adventures of the girl next door before careening into the lethal sadism of a fallen deity. "Bird Superior" describes a plane crash survivor who quite literally takes flight, and in "The Neglected Garden" a woman determined not to leave her lover takes root in the backyard, only to amass all the strength of Mother Earth in wreaking havoc upon him.

Koja's world is a haunting pathological landscape. The stories are layered, nuanced paintings of peculiarity that crescendo in devastating images. Kathe Koja is our Poe for the twentieth-first century.

Kathe Koja is the best-selling author of The Cipher, Bad Brains, Skin, and Strange Angels. She has won the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award. Her short stories have appeared in Whisper of Blood, The Best of Pulphouse, and other anthologies as well as in Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Omni, among other magazines. She is a Detroit native and lives there with her husband and son.