Includes:
· "Arrangement for Invisible Voices"
· "The Neglected Garden"
· "Bird Superior"
· "Illusions in Belief"
· "Reckoning"
· "The Company of Storms"
· "Teratisms"
· "Angels in Love"
· "Waking the Prince"
· "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard"
· "Lady Lazarus"
· "The Disquieting Muse"
· "Queen of Angels"
· "Jubilee"
· "Pas de Deux"
· "Bondage"

Published in 1997, this is the only collection of Koja's short fiction (many other short pieces remain un'collected'), and the last book she published as an adult-oriented horror writer. (Since then she has written five young-adult/children's books).
I've said before, I find her decision to write children's books – especially under the same name – mysterious, as her fiction in general, the stories in this book not excepted, is decidedly Not For Children – and not anything you'd want a kid to pick up accidentally, unless you want to seriously scar their psyche!
However Koja is definitely my favorite horror writer of all time. Her writing style is both casual and lyrically evocative, her images bizarre and surreal – but simultaneously gritty and firmly grounded in reality. Koja loves (or loved?) to deal, thematically, with the angst of art – her characters tend to be artists, writers, performers, usually of the struggling sort – financially, in their relationships with others, and with the traumas of the creative process itself. Whether psychologically tortured or interacting with the supernatural, they always seem like people I might have known – real people, but in these stories, as the title indicates, brought to the extremities... ( )

Koja writes here very literary dark fantasy stories, literary because her emphasis is on character and language. Her characters are in extremis, undergoing transformations, willingly or unwillingly, psychological or physical, that cannot be undone. Some of these are fantastic, like a scorned woman who becomes part of ex-lover's garden or a man who reacts to surviving a plane crash by learning how to fly. Others are psychological, like the woman whose passion for dance leads to starve her body and destroy her ex-lover. Her best story, to my taste, involves an abandoned mother / poetess whose greatest transformation is learning to survive. As for language, Koja is obsessed with creating mood and atmosphere to the point that she very often abandons subject and verb for word pictures and sense impressions. I will read more by her. ( )