Strange Angels

by Kathe Koja

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. Reprint.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Mental Illness, Thriller, Audiobook, Dark, Novels

356 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Kathe Koja is a writer, director and independent producer of live and virtual events. Her work combines and plays with genres, from horror to YA to historical to weird, in books like THE CIPHER, VELOCITIES, BUDDHA BOY, UNDER THE POPPY, and CATHERINE THE GHOST.

Her ongoing project is the world of DARK FACTORY https://darkfactory.club/ continuing in DARK PARK, with DARK MATTER coming out in December 2025.

She's a Detroit native, animal rights supporter, supporter of democracy, and huge fan of Emily Bronte.

Reviews

[Rabbit {Paint me like one of your 19th century gothic heroines!} · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a reason why Kathe Koja is one of my favorite indie horror authors.

There is almost a manic, frantic, and it's uncomfortable to read quality to her writing. Every time I re-read one of her books there is a new element/angle of the book that I did not notice or absorb during the reading before.



Her writing is raw and artistic. Beautiful and poetic. Haunting.



Her writing style is either a love or a hate for readers, imho. I can't guarantee that you'll love it as much as I do. But I love her writing so far. Love.

[Cody | CodysBookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, this is Kathe Koja. My giving this 5 stars isn’t breaking fucking news. Strange Angels sticks to the incredibly high standard I’ve come to expect from one of the greatest living writers of dark fiction: in this one she explores the depths of mental illness (written with frightening sincerity and accuracy) as well as her usual obsessions: art, transformation, obsession, bitter romantic relationships, parasitic social relationships, et cetera. That’s not to say Koja retreads old ground or repeats herself; she doesn’t.

Not at all.

Something that took me off guard was the emotional undercurrent of this novel—Koja’s work usually doesn’t tug at my heart, but this one did. She wrestles with true, difficult human emotion without ever allowing the story to devolve into schmaltz or schlock.

I already want to reread this.

[Rachel Kendall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathe Koja does good crazy. She does crazy good. As with the other book I've read - Bad Brains - she has written about genius and insanity and creativity. The way she writes takes some getting used to. When I first started Bad Brains, I stopped after the first few pages because of her relentless stream-of-consciousness purple-tinted fast stop-start style. But after a few days I decided I wasn't ready to give up on her so I started over. It's a little like getting used to the Scottish lingo in Trainspotting or the coded narration of A Clockwork Orange. Once you have it figured out, it's no longer an issue. In fact, the book would not be the same without this certain leaning.

I loved Bad Brains (shame she is so poor at coming up with decent titles!), and I loved Strange Angels. They're dark, screwy novels that manage to keep afloat in an ocean of over-written trying-too-hard-to-be-cool books on insanity.

[Alex (The Bookubus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grant is a photographer who has lost his passion for his art after working commercial jobs to pay the bills. His girlfriend is an art therapist and Grant starts to notice some drawings in her pile of work that intrigue him so much he insists on meeting the person who drew them. Eventually he meets Robin and they form a friendship, one that becomes obsessive and both nurturing and destructive.

This story is about mental illness and mental health and I thought the topic was handled very realistically. It doesn't sugarcoat or romanticise it, not does it demonise it. It's just very honest. There are some horror elements and weirdness here but for the mostpart this is a character study about these individuals, their relationship and how it changes over time.

Two big elements here are obsession and transformation, which are themes present in Koja's other novels that I've read (The Cipher, Bad Brains and Skin) and I love seeing how she always has a unique way of presenting them within a story. I would say this is the least 'horror' of the four.

I knew partway through reading this book that is was going to make me cry and it did...but not in the way I thought it would. I don't want to give any spoilers but this was a heartbreaking story, both quiet and intense, and beautifully written.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

UTTERLY DEVASTATED




I could read this book forever, why did it have ever have to end?
This book is labeled incorrectly, there is no Horror in this book. Not one bit.
This is a character study, focusing on mental illness and schizophrenia is the demon.
Her language........... It's utterly beautiful despite how grim the details are. I believe this story will live inside my mind for a long time.... its full of memorable scenes which will remain imprinted in my retina, eternal flashing images transfixing me for eternity.
Poor Robin :( sadly enough his demise reminded me of my own battle with my mothers dementia :"(

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

as always in her early novels, koja steers her sentences down every possible detour, dragging them thru the wilds of punctuation and compound clauses. where the cipher & kink can feel a little distended and numbing, strange angels streamlines their claustrophobic psychodrama into a maddening hum. this IS a horror book but in the elusive way that most of the horror writing i like fits into the genre lol. no crowdpleasing no "kills" no lovecraft verbiage no nonsense >:)

[Ceeceereads · Rating 3 out of 5]

He left his girlfriend to move in with a schizophrenic. This book is dark and grimy. It made me feel like I wanted to scream for no reason. I respect that although I didn’t find it the easiest read. I found it a similar experience to watching Hereditary. My brain screaming open the curtains! Let some light in! No such luck.

I did enjoy this quote though:

“Carrying out the cups to see Robin pulling on a sweatshirt, head appearing through the fraying neck like a baby from the birth canal.”

[S.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, how did I not rate this amazing book? Creepy, disturbing and glorious. I still can't wrap my mind around KK writing YA. Or, wait, hold on... hmmm.

[claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

fucking sobfest. oh my dear lord

[Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great sentences and, in the first half, very strong character relations; as with The Cipher, I lost interest in what would happen before it resolved.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathe Koja is the queen of deeply, deeply twisted dingy apartment narratives. The formula is: take talented but fucked up alt-artists (any medium will do), put them in an apartment together, and then basically only write about the ensuing sexual & psychological chaos that take place within those walls. It is disturbing as fuck, as expected, but Koja is a poet at heart so it's also beautiful, and judicious (mostly) to the fucked-up denizens therein. Strange Angels is terrifying, visceral, fascinating, but not as gorgeous as the stunning Skin, or Kink. Still a trip and a half and worth all the nausea.

[Alyssa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even finish this book. It's well-written enough but the stupidity and selfishness of the main character (Grant) got me so frustrated and angry that I just couldn't get through it. Who in the hell would ever think that taking in a schizophrenic you don't even know and isolating him from everything and anything therapeutic would not end in tragedy?! I know it's fiction, but come on! Absurd.

[Remi Mevertis-Karim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Needed Editing

Everything from the sentence structure and flow, grammar, punctuation, capitalization. At first I thought it was an odd stylistic choice, but it became more clear by the amount of typos that it was just very poorly edited

Additionally, the story itself seemed aimless. Like it was constantly approaching something but never got anywhere

[Travis Ammons · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book was a major influence on me in my mid to late 20s. I've never found a copy either. i should just order it and reread it. I have "Kink" by Koja as well; it's good but it doesn't even come close to comparison to 'Angels.' Different ballpark, fuck. Different sport.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, indeed. Koja's writing style is absorbing and heady, taking you to places you never thought existed.

[CaptainMal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this book—

—every few months or so for twenty years. And every time I think I’ve taken everything it has to offer, it surprises me again.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so began my obsession with sensory deprivation tanks....
I remember reading this sitting at my granny's dining room table with the Last Supper looking down on me.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I like Koja's style, I have a hard time with her protagonists. I get that she's writing about those who are disaffected and on the fringe, but man, they're hardly ever likable. They're all in bad situations, but most of the time they're there because of their own actions, and, even when they know that about themselves, they don't do anything to get themselves out of those situations. It's hard to sympathize with characters like that.

Strange Angels is less horror than it is an examination of mental illness, and I might have liked it more had I not read Challenger Deep a few weeks before. Both books look at schizophrenia, but it feels like Shusterman has a much better understanding of the illness than Koja does. Between that juxtaposition and the lack of sympathy for the main character, it was hard to get behind this story as much as I have Koja's other works.

One final note: I read this as an ebook, and the number of typos were inexcusable. Lots of commas had been replaced by periods, which is bad enough in any book, but in one where the author writes in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style, it's unforgivable. Pay a damn proofreader to make sure the texts scanned correctly!

[katabaza · Rating 1 out of 5]

i hated it :D

[ax · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m not dying… come and see!

[Juushika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Through his art therapist girlfriend, Grant meets Robin--a young schizophrenic whose exquisite art sparks an obsession. Strange Angels is written in Koja's distinctive abrupt and visceral style, but fails to exhibit or suit that style as well as some of her other work. There's something not quite strange enough about it: tropes linking madness and art are extremely problematic, but Koja comes just short of idealization; schizophrenia influences Robin's art but doesn't always aid or elevate it. It's welcome restraint, but robs the book of a purpose or payoff that could balance its dirty and joyless nature. Strange Angels is what one would expect from Koja, character-fueled and compelling, and fans may enjoy it, but it fails to be remarkable in its own right.

[Eva]

kathe's prose here is as disorientingly free-associative as it's ever been (significantly moreso than in The Cipher or Bad Brains), clearly evoking schizophasic rhythms at times and at others merely the despairing empty logorrhea of her central character's grasping brain; her narrative sensibility is subtle and not as ungenerous as it might appear on first glance, suggesting no easy solution to the triangulation of maladies at play and to the fact of severe mental illness itself, only the romantic, monomaniacal desire to access abjected otherness in the human mind, and the slow, boschian decompensatory procession of illness and transformation in the pursuit of said desire. very solid

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

With prose that affects the reader like poetry, a story that is never predictable, and characters mesmerizing in their strangeness, reading this book was a thoroughly absorbing, mind altering experience. Kathe Koja's ability to turn a phrase, a passage, and a tale is unnervingly masterful, and this novel in particular never failed to keep me from settling into comfortable routine.

Rereading it in 2020, it had no less of an impact on me as it did in the 1990s. I don't know if there is any such thing as a perfect book, but this novel comes remarkably close.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The new cover makes this look like a horror novel, but really, I'd call it psychological drama. Too much for me to say about it, so to make it simple, just google it. Ranks among my all-time favorite books.

[Robert Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first encounter with Kathe Koja, and her writing voice definitely takes some getting used to. About half the sentences lack a predicate, which can make it hard to understand what was going on.

[Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[r. fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me longer to read than any of the other Koja books. I struggled to fall into the prose, something that felt so much easier to do in THE CIPHER or SKIN. But that just goes to show you the razor-thin line Koja dances on with her muscular, pulsing, indescribable style. It's as easy to fall onto one side of it, and be completely alienated, unable to find an in-road, as it is to fall to the other side, and be totally consumed by it, unable to imagine books being written any other way. I couldn't tap into her rhythm for the first half of STRANGE ANGELS but by the last two parts, I understood that that was a failure of my mood and attention rather than the novel itself. Koja is a narrative-first writer. There's no unused scene, no flippant dialogue--everything is in service of story, a very Classic Horror ethos. However, Koja manages to do this all while doing an elliptical high wire dance at the level of language, sentence, and grammar. I can't think of anyone else in horror who would even try to operate so fully, with so much trust of the reader. It's so generous!!! This novel more than any of the others had me in awe of her as a grammar punk. Most "experimental" writers I think of limit their transgression to a sentence or linguistic level, never really bothering to engage with english grammar in a genuine way; but Koja is able to subvert readers at a structural level, a serious grammatical level--like a poet but without the pretense, every move vital to the story itself. It's so thrilling to read a writer who entertains as much as she digests; invites as much as she echoes; is permeable as much as she's opaque. STRANGE ANGELS, like her other books, is about process. The process of becoming *something*, of exceeding ourselves, the power of ritual to transform ourselves--the inevitability of change when we submit to our urges or destiny (are they the same?), and what that change entails when we're faithful to whatever we're going through. This and ANTICHRIST are the two best contemporary anti-therapist texts we have, now that America is a BetterHelp colony, completely unable by threat of death to criticize mental healthcare practices, or even their providers. Both pieces are cheeky and snide, but also deadly serious about the expansive possibilities (or consequences, depending on who you ask) of "illness" when we reject the domineering psychosurveillance of therapy. Categorization will always be violent to lived experience--and what is therapy beyond a sleek, expensive series of categorizations? Saddest book of the year so far. I was shocked to feel the depth of my sadness during the last 30 pages. It totally snuck up on me. My bf said that the ending had a MARTYRS sort of vibe, and that's soooo true. I'M NOT DYING; COME AND SEE :)

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me half a month to begin writing any comprehensive thoughts about this book. Firstly Koja engages at a much more direct level with the themes I've come to expect from her work. Transcendence is the ultimate object of Koja's 90s novels. A process-- she is constantly writing about an inexplicable process, and in this book the process is not only explicable, but medically documented. Is it transcendence? I guess that's the question. Often in her novels one can undergo transformation of body and mind, of reality, but fall short of the actual birth into the next state, whatever it may be, that they are undergoing the process to reach. There is no final understanding; in fact, often her characters are driven by fundamental misunderstanding. Is transcendence the end result or the process itself? Can one engage in transcendence without transcending? Is engaging in transcendence by default transcending? These questions are not answered, and only one is, and it is how it feels to engage in transcendence. It feels like this: shocking meaning, and then unending hollowness.

The other theme I've seen in all I've read by her is the exploitation of someone slightly further along in this process by someone rooted firmly in the real world. The piggybacking onto someone else's enlightenment, which usually appears in the form of an artist being used for their art, as in Skin. The thing that separates this book out, and Grant as a character from Koja's usual male exploiter, is that he doesn't permanently leave behind his responsibility for Robin in order to embrace the possibility of his transcendence. He often puts the latter first in situations that then end unfavourably, but when he does it is always warring with his responsibility. Ultimately his care for Robin won out, another rarity, just much too late. Often the last acts of Koja's exploiters are of subjugation, of violence against the exploited, of abandonment and belittlement; the last acts of the exploited are often acts of love. There was abandonment of Robin by Grant, occurring much earlier, the intrinsic abandonment of valuing the symptoms of his illness over his person, his personal wellbeing. There was also however unconscious, unintentional, an abandonment of Grant by Robin. I find it really interesting that in this work, with her themes closest to the surface of anything I've read by her, she also inverts them in increasingly unavoidable and heartbreaking ways.

Although Grant is the locus of perspective the person I felt the least psychic distance with was Robin. It was a case not of seeing yourself in someone but of seeing the possibility of yourself in someone. I am only x days without medication away from him and my distance from him wanes and waxes with stress, circumstance, even without reason. As such I really love Koja for giving the reader, there at the end, the slightest possibility that he is right, that he has been right about everything, and he will not die of heart failure, starvation, stress and starvation, and he will transcend.

[David Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Strange Angels, Kathe Koja takes a classic story of obsession, of a photographer in a career funk who becomes increasingly fascinated with the drawings of a schizophrenic patient, and elevates it into something darker and more introspective with her trademark splintered and highly subjective writing style.

The narrative itself often takes a backseat to the interior world of the main character’s rationalizations and recriminations, as he weighs the ambivalence of his actions. At one point, he attempts a sensory deprivation experiment where the characters will be devoid of light for an extended period of time, and this seems like a fitting representation of the novel as a whole since readers are left in the dark in a similar way for a majority of the book. Otherwise, the quotidian and ethereal sit next to–or, perhaps, right on top of–each other in a way that suggests the sacred may be the divine.

I’m not convinced the inciting incident, of seeing some otherworldly drawings, is really enough to prompt the protagonist’s obsession, but the relationship that develops is certainly an interesting one. It’s never clear whether he’s enabling a man with a problem to have a full-on mental breakdown or whether he’s encouraging a misunderstood man to have a breakthrough to another plane of existence. It’s a bit like Koja was telling her own more crass, more disheveled rendition of Bartleby the Scrivener, where an inscrutable man, now labeled with the ills of modern science, just doesn’t fit into the broader world.

[Alexis Gonzalez · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book. Maaaaan oh man.. this.... book.


Can someone PLEASE explain to me what the EFF I just read ????

My gahd. Is this guy insane ? Just a weirdo?
What the hell ??? I'm almost about to finish it. And I just... I just dont... know.... I hate being teased with moments where I think to myself "uh oh. Ok nowww sh*& is about to get scary and crazy." But then...... "nope."

I was just waiting for it to turn into a horror novel in some way. Any way. And it never took off. So I'm just accepting it for what it is. A queer little story. With an even queerer protagonist. I just don't know what to make of him
Hopefully the end of the book will soothe my questioning mind. My synapses are bloody raw from going over the same question about him. 'Why is he so obsessed with this boy and are those drawings really THAT good??? Because I know he isn't gay. And bi? Idk. I think not. He's just captured by this schizophrenic boy. And it is never explained why. And I almost went schizophrenic trying to make sense of it! And that stream of conscious writing style... got a little old. And made me kinda wish I was reading something else. I really wanted to like it. And the beginning was very intriguing. But I don't like big questions never being answered. It makes me feel like there isn't an answer. And booooooo to that!