Extremities - Hardcover

In the 16 stories of Extremities, Kathe Koja enters the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary and often disturbing situations. In "Bird Superior," for example, a plane-crash survivor trades his memory of the crash for the ability to fly. "Angels in Love" is the story of Lurleen, a washed-out woman trapped in a meaningless cycle of dead-end work, singles bars, and solitude. She lives vicariously by eavesdropping on Anne, a neighbor who seems to have found the passion and sexual satisfaction that eludes Lurleen. Upon meeting Anne, however, she discovers an even more meaningless life: Anne has made the ultimate trade, exchanging her soul for physical fulfillment. In "The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard," an imprisoned poet who writes on behalf of the dispossessed shares the last moments of his life with the reader. Although the location of the prison is unclear, the scene recalls the Franco regime. The poet chooses to die rather than face a life without his writing, but, in his final seconds, he takes solace that his remains may one day form the body of a new poet.

Extremities is Koja's sixth book. Her writing is lush and poetic, yet at the same time she leaves much unsaid, counting on the reader to ground the stories with his or her own sense of place. Koja's blend of mundane characters, supernatural or at least unexplained situations, and a constant undercurrent of the erotic, is a satisfying and disturbing gateway into another world. Each story, unique in character and setting, gives a snapshot of an existence where reality and nightmares collide. --Andy Bookwalter

In this daring but unsatisfying collection, Koja (The Cipher; Bad Brains) creates characters on and over the edges of madness, self-destruction and sexual obsession. Of these 17 stories (many first published in leading SF venues), the best are reminiscent of Poe or Calvino, unsettling fables in which supernatural elements illuminate complex human relations and psychological states. In "Bird Superior," a stunned plane crash survivor becomes able to fly "between the glide of the clouds beneath him, and the bite of windy stars." In "Jubilee," a lonely woman in a lackluster marriage turns into a disembodied voice in her husband's head after her erotic encounter with a whispering ghost. In these stories, Koja uses her considerable gift for sensory description to real purpose. Far too often, however, the visceral, self-consciously dark tales of the ugly and macabre seem designed merely to shock. In the opening story, "Arrangement for Invisible Voices," a man who confides his troubles to a headless Barbie doll loses his sexual potency after attending a barbecue; he is haunted by the sound of dying pigs, the "unbearable tender wail of their murdered cries, scaling like the scream of high opera." In "Teratisms," the weakest piece, a baby-eating monster-boy obsessively recites the names of cities in Louisiana and horrifies his troubled siblings by coughing up human blood and fingers at McDonald's. Such gratuitous grotesquerie is disturbing without being provocative and generates, at times, an unintentional comic effect.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.