Both a writer of modern horror novels for adults and sympathetic outsider tales for young adults, author Kathe Koja is a versatile wordsmith. Koja's adult novels have been compared, as Paula Guran noted on the DarkEcho Horror Web site, to the work of "Franz Kafka, Clive Barker, Don DeLillo, Marcel Proust, Katherine Dunn, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, William S. Burroughs and God knows who else." Guran further noted that Koja's novels have been labeled variously, "post-modern, 'modern primitive . . . and classy smut,'" and that people either love Koja's work or "dismiss it." Indeed, Koja has, with her handful of horror novels, elicited both high praise and angered condemnation from reviewers. A Michigan novelist living in metropolitan Detroit, Koja is viewed by critics as bringing new blood to the horror genre. "Koja is that rare writer who has not only cultivated a distinctly original approach to...