Kathe Koja – författare

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award 1992Winner of the Locus Award 1992Shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick AwardNicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand - weeping not blood, but a plasma of tears...It began with Nakota and her crooked grin. She had to see the dark hole in the storage room down the hall. She had to make love to Nicholas beside it, and stare into its secretive, promising depths. Then Nakota began her experiments: First, she put an insect into the hole. Then a mouse... Now from down the hall, the black hole calls out to Nicholas every day and every night. And he will go to it. Because it has already seared his flesh, infected his soul, and started him on a journey of obsession - through its soothing, blank darkness into the blinding core of terror...

As Tess Bajac welds jagged scraps of salvage metal into brutal, beautiful forms, she dreams that her sculptures might one day move. Bibi Bloss is a dancer in search of sensation, her practice drifting from movement toward a more dangerous kind of performance - one etched directly into the body. When Tess and Bibi's paths cross, a partnership sparks which quickly becomes defined by obsession and need. As their collaboration grows more intense, both their work and relationship are remade in a dangerous new form. As Bibi pursues perfection, others join in her acts of risk and surrender. More blood is shed with each new work, culminating in a daring final performance that demands the ultimate sacrifice. Skin is a haunting exploration of artistic devotion and desire, a descent into the brutal intimacy between artist and muse, and an unflinching examination of how far the body - and the heart - can be pushed before it finally breaks.

This “toothy follow-up to Datlow’s first-rate Blood Is Not Enough” offers “admirably inventive variations on vampirism” (Kirkus Reviews).   Featuring stories by Jonathan Carroll, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Robert Silverberg, A Whisper of Blood is a “consistently engrossing anthology” from award-winning editor Ellen Datlow (Publishers Weekly). Continuing to expand the boundaries of the concept of vampirism—as she did in her first collection, Blood Is Not Enough—Datlow has assembled eighteen fascinating stories that range from tales of literal vampires to what she calls “metaphorical bloodsuckers,” who can drain another’s life force without ever sinking their teeth into necks.   In “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” by Suzy McKee Charnas, an elderly Jewish woman who’s taken her own life has second thoughts and makes a deal to become a vampire to stay immortal, the only condition being she has to drink blood by request only. An amnesiac operative tries to sort out if a secret government agency is trying to help him regain his memory or is wiping it clean in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Kafkaesque “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?” And in Jonathan Carroll’s “The Moose Church,” a tourist in Sardinia is literally scarred by asking questions of death in his dreams . . .   A Whisper of Blood includes contributions by Suzy McKee Charnas, Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Silverberg, Kathe Koja, Elizabeth Massie, Barry N. Malzberg, Rick Wilber, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Ligotti, Melissa Mia Hall, David J. Schow, Jack Womack, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Thomas Tessier, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, K. W. Jeter, Pat Cadigan, and Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth.