Strange Angels

By: Kathe Koja

Narrated by: Matt Godfrey

Grant, an ambitious photographer, is possessed by a young mental patient's strange drawings and becomes the disturbed young artist's confidant and guardian in a relationship that pushes Grant's own sanity to the edge.

Kathe Koja’s books include The Mercury Waltz, Under the Poppy, and The Cipher and Skin. Her young adult novels include Buddha Boy, Talk, and Kissing the Bee. Her work has been honored by the ALA, the ASPCA, and with the Bram Stoker Award.

Her books have been published in seven languages and optioned for film. She’s a Detroit native and lives in the area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder. She also runs Loudermilk Productions, creating site-specific immersive events including performances of Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland, Faustus, and her own adaptation of Under the Poppy.

©1994 Kathe Koja (P)2019 David N. Wilson

Another great Kathe Koja Novel

Another great horror from Kathe Koja.
Love, Obsession, horror and Artistic Creativity with vivid character development.
Kathe always finds a way to imprint full color motion directly from her pages.

A fan for life

Home run

Her way with words, her ability to make you feel what the people in her stories feel. Just awesome

Art

There's no one that can craft a sentence quite like Kathe Koja. Beautiful writing, complicated characters, thought-provoking, and compelling. Will read again. 5 stars!

Great performance, challenging novel

I received a free copy of this audiobook, so I am providing this honest review in return.

This was a fascinating, difficult book, as I have come to expect from Koja. This is the second book of hers I've read; the first is her horror classic THE CIPHER, which has a few similar themes to this one and is just as bizarre. Let me just say that the title for this book fits it perfectly.

However, if you're looking for the same kind of horror from THE CIPHER, you may want to try another book. May I recommend David Peak's CORPSEPAINT or Poppy Z. Brite's DRAWING BLOOD instead?

Short Summary

STRANGE ANGELS focuses on Grant, a down-and-out photographer whose still-life photos of fruit and other foods are uninspired and uninspiring, and whose loss of passion has driven him to quit his job and move in with his art-therapist girlfriend, Johnna. Despite Johnna's efforts to keep her professional and personal lives separate, Grant sees a drawing that one of Johnna's patients had drawn during a therapy session. These drawings inspire something in Grant, and in spite of her objections and best efforts to keep him away from the patient, Grant seeks out the artist, a schizophrenic named Robin, and befriends him in the hopes that Robin will show Grant more of his drawings as a means of pursuing a different means of seeing and understanding the world around him. I won't go into more detail for fear of spoiling the story.

My Thoughts/Reactions

Koja writes artsy, complex, and complicated characters (who are not always sympathetic or likeable), and who often pursue experiences that either have experiences or seek to have experience that are transcendent and beyond the bounds of "reality." In a way, I think STRANGE ANGELS and THE CIPHER are both novels about what the Romantic poets called "the sublime," but in a post-modern form. If that sounds pretentious, it might be, and this novel may not be for you. Like I said earlier, this deeply-literary novel is fascinating and difficult (and perhaps at times pretentious, or at least about pretentious, unsympathetic people).

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this book. The audiobook performance, given by the estimable Matt Godfrey (whose performances I've written about before), is solid, as usual. Koja's language is beautiful and her imagination enviable. As with THE CIPHER, however, I felt as though I only understood some of it. In both cases, I had to reread (or relisten to) sections of the book a few times in order to feel as though I had even the slightest indication of what was going on. It seems likely that this is a part of a broader pattern, that Koja is smarter and better at her craft than most, and writes artsy, challenging books about artsy, challenging people. This is definitely a book I will revisit in the future (and it seems likely I'll actually read the physical book next time for a different experience).