Extremities

Rating:
Summary: a writer too enamored with style
Review: Kathe Koja is the author of The Cipher, Bad Brains, Strange Angels, Skin and Kink... and if you wanted to sum up this collection in ten words or less, those titles would do it, for ciphers, bad brains, strange angels, skin and kink can be all found here. An even better précis, however, is the title of one of the stories: 'The Disquieting Muse'.

In Danse Macabre, his non-fiction book about horror, Stephen King quotes a review in which a horror film is dismissed as being "for those who like to slow down to look at car crashes" (which, King suggests, is most if not all of us). Koja's brand of horror is quite different. Only a few of the 16 tales in Extremities are horror stories, in the sense of having conventionally scary plots and subject matter - ghosts, demons, monsters, madness - but even most of those that aren't have a dreamlike quality that is disquieting if not terrifying, more like the moments before or after a car crash, where shock distorts your sense of time and reality in a way which is painless but in which everything feels vaguely wrong. Even though all of these stories are told in third person, many have the subjective quality of first-person narrative, making it more difficult to deny or even doubt the insanity of what is apparently happening.

Koja's basic plots are simple, but unpredictable; her main strength, apart from her sensual and often surreal style, is her characterization. As with The Cipher, many of these stories are shaped by how her complex and often bizarre yet believable characters will deal with equally bizarre situations. In 'Arrangement for Invisible Voices', an impotent man becomes obsessed with the head of a Barbie doll. In 'Bird Superior', the survivor of a plane crash becomes capable of flight. In 'Illusions in Relief', an artist specializing in horrific collages is sought out as a faith healer. In 'Queen of Angels', a nurse believes that a comatose patient is crying pearls.

If you're unfamiliar with Koja's work, this is an excellent introduction. If you like her novels, these stories are just as weird, but tighter and slightly more intense. Buy it, keep it, and read the stories with intervals of reality between them for maximum effect.

Rating:
Summary: A disquieting muse
Review: Kathe Koja is the author of The Cipher, Bad Brains, Strange Angels, Skin and Kink... and if you wanted to sum up this collection in ten words or less, those titles would do it, for ciphers, bad brains, strange angels, skin and kink can be all found here. An even better précis, however, is the title of one of the stories: 'The Disquieting Muse'.

In Danse Macabre, his non-fiction book about horror, Stephen King quotes a review in which a horror film is dismissed as being "for those who like to slow down to look at car crashes" (which, King suggests, is most if not all of us). Koja's brand of horror is quite different. Only a few of the 16 tales in Extremities are horror stories, in the sense of having conventionally scary plots and subject matter - ghosts, demons, monsters, madness - but even most of those that aren't have a dreamlike quality that is disquieting if not terrifying, more like the moments before or after a car crash, where shock distorts your sense of time and reality in a way which is painless but in which everything feels vaguely wrong. Even though all of these stories are told in third person, many have the subjective quality of first-person narrative, making it more difficult to deny or even doubt the insanity of what is apparently happening.

Koja's basic plots are simple, but unpredictable; her main strength, apart from her sensual and often surreal style, is her characterization. As with The Cipher, many of these stories are shaped by how her complex and often bizarre yet believable characters will deal with equally bizarre situations. In 'Arrangement for Invisible Voices', an impotent man becomes obsessed with the head of a Barbie doll. In 'Bird Superior', the survivor of a plane crash becomes capable of flight. In 'Illusions in Relief', an artist specializing in horrific collages is sought out as a faith healer. In 'Queen of Angels', a nurse believes that a comatose patient is crying pearls.

If you're unfamiliar with Koja's work, this is an excellent introduction. If you like her novels, these stories are just as weird, but tighter and slightly more intense. Buy it, keep it, and read the stories with intervals of reality between them for maximum effect.

Rating:
Summary: the best of the best
Review: Kathe Koja is, hands down, the best writer of short fiction I have ever read...better even than Harlan Ellison! I've spent a good part of the last ten years searching back issues of sf mags for her stories. It's great to have these 16 stories all in one book.

Rating:
Summary: Uncommon Horror That Transcends Genre
Review: Kathe Koja's writing transcends genre. Her literary, stream-of-consciousness style takes you into an alternate reality. If you enjoy the taste of these short stories, do not hesitate to track down all of her novels as well. Apparently, Kathe Koja has reinvented herself as a young adult author. Though I wish her great success in that endeavor, I sincerely hope that she hasn't altogether abandoned adult fiction. It would be a real tragedy to lose such an independent, imaginative voice.

Rating:
Summary: One twisted book
Review: Koja's collection of short stories are a mixture of the bizarre, erotic, and haunting. Koja's writing style is concise and descriptive -- sometimes even vulgar and offensive.

The stories in this work are dark stories -- that is, they explore those topics we would prefer to ignore -- death, fear, hauntings, insanity, and deviant sex. all of these dark topics are strangely interwoven in love themes.

"The Neglected Garden" is intriguing. Almost like a nightmare, the tale challenges the reader to believe in something that seems preposterous -- a woman scorned slowly dying in a neglected back yard in eye shot of her husband. The story is truely spooky.

"Angels in Love" explores, graphically, the desire of a woman to have the unseen lover of her neighbor. She can hear the lovers through the wall and deparately desires to experience the lover first hand.

Each story is a graphic description of the darker side of humanity -- psychiatrists longing for deranged patients, sea monsters, euthanasia, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Overwritten "High Brow" Emptiness
Review: Seems like I'm in the minority on this one, in that I didn't like it...at all. Maybe it was my expectations, I bought this one because of the high reviews and classification of 'horror'. I wasn't expecting the prosaic piece of literature that this book is. Kathe's writing is very skillful, very visual, and I liked that, but the point of a short story collection is the stories, which I found to be terribly lacking. While some of the concepts were, at best, mildly interesting, she does not persue the horror aspect of it, just the literary merit of the writing. She writes literature in a horror background. What does that mean, well take the example of the teenagers fishing for monsters in a lake. You know the creatures are there and they've sent someone in to lure one back to shore, but the story is about the teenages and thier teenage lives. It was well written, descriptive (of the teenagers, the van, the lake, but not much of the creatures) and well charactized, but the horror is a suggestion, an aside to the teenagers story. I still can't belive I read the whole thing, maybe I was waiting for the next story to be worthy of all the book's praise.

Rating:
Summary: Please don't hate me....
Review: Seems like I'm in the minority on this one, in that I didn't like it...at all. Maybe it was my expectations, I bought this one because of the high reviews and classification of 'horror'. I wasn't expecting the prosaic piece of literature that this book is. Kathe's writing is very skillful, very visual, and I liked that, but the point of a short story collection is the stories, which I found to be terribly lacking. While some of the concepts were, at best, mildly interesting, she does not persue the horror aspect of it, just the literary merit of the writing. She writes literature in a horror background. What does that mean, well take the example of the teenagers fishing for monsters in a lake. You know the creatures are there and they've sent someone in to lure one back to shore, but the story is about the teenages and thier teenage lives. It was well written, descriptive (of the teenagers, the van, the lake, but not much of the creatures) and well charactized, but the horror is a suggestion, an aside to the teenagers story. I still can't belive I read the whole thing, maybe I was waiting for the next story to be worthy of all the book's praise.

Rating:
Summary: a writer too enamored with style
Review: There are some very good stories in this collection. I liked The Neglected Garden, Teratisms and Angels in Love. These pieces have a visceral edge under the weight of the beautiful words. Koja writes in a lush, lovely, almost dreamy style but overdoes it most of the time. She writes descriptions that are so glorious I stopped several times to revel in the words. But then she will continue the description, sentence after sentence and sometimes into multiple paragraphs until you've lost the thread of what she was talking about in the first place.

Some of the stories I found just plain dull, others were confusing or had a terrible ending which ruined the story. More problematic was, I felt, a lack of a coherent plot many times. Too many of the pieces ended up as empty words. Beautiful words, but empty.

Rating:
Summary: Another excellent book from Koja
Review: There can be little doubt anymore that Kathe Koja is America's finest living writer. From the moment her first short story was published close to ten years ago ("Illusions in Relief," reprinted here), the world heralded the coming of the first truly original writer since Clive Barker, and Koja went-- and still goes-- places Barker has never trod. 1991 saw the publication of more stories and the first novel, _The Cipher_, which still stands as the single finest surrealist work in the English language. After a slight slip which shall remain nameless, she returned to publish two of those rare novels that are perfect in every way, Skin and Strange Angels. And throughout, every once in a while she'd unleash another story upon the world in some small, out-of-the-way magazine, or some small-press collection of cutting-edge horror bought by the few thousand faithful who are aware of the genius that is the "new horror." Meanwhile, the rest of the world has overlooked Koja and her contemporaries... until now. Four Walls Eight Windows, one of the most prestigious and well-distributed of the literary presses, has signed both Kathe Koja and Lucius Shepard, among others. _Extremities_ is the first offering of what I can only half-jokingly call the new era of Four Walls Eight Windows, and it's a barnburner, all right.

That's not to say it doesn't slip now and again. When Koja's on, she's on, and when she's off, she's still pretty close to on, but there's a difference in tone to those stories where she's off. They don't grab and hold quite as well. It's more allowable in an eight or ten page story than it is in a two hundred page novel like Bad Brains (oops, there, I said it), but there's still a change, almost as if the air around the reader warms a few degrees and becomes more comfortable.

So what is it about "the new horror" that makes it markedly different horror of the Stephen King variety-- and, for that matter, everything that's come after, such as splatterpunk, cyberhorror, and all the other neat little catchphrases-- deals in the monster, wheter that monster is the panther stalking through Central Park, the many-eyed horror from outer space, or the soul of a psychopath. And whether you show the panther (as in the 1982 Cat People) or show what may be the shadow (as in the 1944 Cat People), you're still dealing in the monster. "The new horror" likes to deal more in the surreal-- the horror is in the absence of the monster, or perhaps the fear that you'll open the door and the monster won't be there. Surrealism, defined, is mainly composed of unrequited longing, something that many of the new surrealists have never grasped. Perhaps, then, the mantle needs to come down to the (do I need to say it again?) authors whose fiercely original stories and novels cause far more shuddering than the new, ponderous tomes by the old masters.

And that's what Koja's done best, since day one. "Illusions in Relief" is a short, quite deranged story about an artist whose work is rumored to be, in some odd way, faith-healing. And as the story unfolds, you see that it's not faith-healing, it's something else entirely; but _what_ that something else is is never explained. You don't know. And you don't care, because some part of you doesn't WANT to know, just like you didn't want to know what was really at the bottom of the funhole in _The Cipher_ (or whether the funhole even had a bottom). It's never explained, and it shouldn't be, because what scares humanity most is that very lack of explanation. Once you know that the monster in the corner is a bathrobe draped over a chair, it's no longer scary. And horror doesn't have to be supernatural, either; "The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard" covers the last twenty-four hours of the life of Federico Garcia Lorca, and a more horrific twnety-four hours may never have been spent by any human being.

Extremities is not yet out of print, but judging by the length of time it took Borders to order it for me, it's probably pretty close. I'd suggest you find a copy of this as soon as humanly possible, or it will become just as hard to find as all of Koja's other books.

Rating:
Summary: Another excellent book from Koja
Review: There can be little doubt anymore that Kathe Koja is America's finest living writer. From the moment her first short story was published close to ten years ago ("Illusions in Relief," reprinted here), the world heralded the coming of the first truly original writer since Clive Barker, and Koja went-- and still goes-- places Barker has never trod. 1991 saw the publication of more stories and the first novel, _The Cipher_, which still stands as the single finest surrealist work in the English language. After a slight slip which shall remain nameless, she returned to publish two of those rare novels that are perfect in every way, Skin and Strange Angels. And throughout, every once in a while she'd unleash another story upon the world in some small, out-of-the-way magazine, or some small-press collection of cutting-edge horror bought by the few thousand faithful who are aware of the genius that is the "new horror." Meanwhile, the rest of the world has overlooked Koja and her contemporaries... until now. Four Walls Eight Windows, one of the most prestigious and well-distributed of the literary presses, has signed both Kathe Koja and Lucius Shepard, among others. _Extremities_ is the first offering of what I can only half-jokingly call the new era of Four Walls Eight Windows, and it's a barnburner, all right.

That's not to say it doesn't slip now and again. When Koja's on, she's on, and when she's off, she's still pretty close to on, but there's a difference in tone to those stories where she's off. They don't grab and hold quite as well. It's more allowable in an eight or ten page story than it is in a two hundred page novel like Bad Brains (oops, there, I said it), but there's still a change, almost as if the air around the reader warms a few degrees and becomes more comfortable.

So what is it about "the new horror" that makes it markedly different horror of the Stephen King variety-- and, for that matter, everything that's come after, such as splatterpunk, cyberhorror, and all the other neat little catchphrases-- deals in the monster, wheter that monster is the panther stalking through Central Park, the many-eyed horror from outer space, or the soul of a psychopath. And whether you show the panther (as in the 1982 Cat People) or show what may be the shadow (as in the 1944 Cat People), you're still dealing in the monster. "The new horror" likes to deal more in the surreal-- the horror is in the absence of the monster, or perhaps the fear that you'll open the door and the monster won't be there. Surrealism, defined, is mainly composed of unrequited longing, something that many of the new surrealists have never grasped. Perhaps, then, the mantle needs to come down to the (do I need to say it again?) authors whose fiercely original stories and novels cause far more shuddering than the new, ponderous tomes by the old masters.

And that's what Koja's done best, since day one. "Illusions in Relief" is a short, quite deranged story about an artist whose work is rumored to be, in some odd way, faith-healing. And as the story unfolds, you see that it's not faith-healing, it's something else entirely; but _what_ that something else is is never explained. You don't know. And you don't care, because some part of you doesn't WANT to know, just like you didn't want to know what was really at the bottom of the funhole in _The Cipher_ (or whether the funhole even had a bottom). It's never explained, and it shouldn't be, because what scares humanity most is that very lack of explanation. Once you know that the monster in the corner is a bathrobe draped over a chair, it's no longer scary. And horror doesn't have to be supernatural, either; "The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard" covers the last twenty-four hours of the life of Federico Garcia Lorca, and a more horrific twnety-four hours may never have been spent by any human being.

Extremities is not yet out of print, but judging by the length of time it took Borders to order it for me, it's probably pretty close. I'd suggest you find a copy of this as soon as humanly possible, or it will become just as hard to find as all of Koja's other books.