Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Extremities

Name: Extremities
Author: Kathe Koja
ISBN: 9781568581507

by Kathe Koja

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Overview

In the hypnotic, psychological landscape of Kathe Koja, people pushed to extremes of endurance -- physical and emotional -- illuminate the netherworld of artistic exploration and insantiy, and the slippery slope into perversity -- sexual and violent. The stories in Extremities explore encounters with the unexplainable and the bizarre; old-fashioned obsession and vengeance with consequences twisted and unique; interecting 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.

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, disturbing pictures until they metastisize and consume him. "Angels in Love" starts out with 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 terrain. the stories are layered, nuanced paintings of peculiarity that crescendo in devastating images. Koja is our Edgar Allan Poe for the 21st century.

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Editorials

Christopher Atamian

...Koja's provocative story lines and evocative prose combine reality with inventionthe supernatural with the everyday. —The New York Times Book Review

San Francisco Chronicle

Koja flashes from literary fiction to genre horror to artistic speculation so fast the reader has barely recovered from one attack before the next begins.

Voice Literary Supplement

Kathe Koja drags hardcore horror into the present.

Christopher Atamian

...Koja's provocative story lines and evocative prose combine reality with invention, the supernatural with the everyday. -- The New York Times Book Review

horroronline

You don't just read Kathe Koja, you experience her words with a tactile sense of exploring forbidden territory. Unmarked with defined boundaries, in this terrain, there always seems to be another layer to penetrate, another level to ascend or descend to. With her first collection of short stories, Extremities, Koja adds to her already formidable reputation as a singular and remarkable literary voice. The author of five novels (The Cipher, Bad Brains, Skin, Strange Angels, and Kink, Koja is known for her sensuously descriptive poetic prose and characters pushed to artistic, obsessive, insane, and unexplainable extremes.
— horroronline

Kirkus Reviews

In another victory of style over substance, Koja (Kink) offers up more of her creepy-crawly worldview, this time in short takes in a first collection of stories (15 previously published). What to do when your dead girlfriend rises from the grave, along with some other folks, all of whom have neat, new, silvery eyes? Drew learns a quick lesson in afterlife etiquette in "Reckoning," but it does him little good when everyone gets blown away by some young bucks prowling for freaks. What to do when you lust after your next-door neighbor's boyfriend—who's a guy you've never actually seen but hear in action every night through the wall)? Because she's bored and restless, Lurleen sets a trap for the one she imagines to be an erotic jackhammer in "Angels in Love"—only to discover that the man of her dreams really isn't human after all (nor is he an angel). Keeping truly odd company, Federico Garc¡a Lorca and Sylvia Plath wind up here, too, in "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard" and "Lady Lazarus," respectively, as the final moments of their lives are vividly (if rather too transparently) evoked. But Koja's blunt, visceral, at times incantatory style really takes off when she reaches the limits of "normal" experience without dipping into a bag of cheap tricks—as in "Pas de Deux," in which a would-be dancer degrades herself in the pursuit of perfection (even to the point of death); or as in "The Disquieting Muse," which features an empathic art therapist whose manner works wonders with psychotics—until he finds himself aroused and confused by one of his clients. Otherwise, what we have here is a grab-bag of shock effects and ooze, boosted into a semblance of distinctionby one who knows disturbingly well the power of words.