Who Goes There?

Kathe Koja started getting professionally published in the late ’80s, as part of a generation of new horror and SF writers, appearing more or less fully formed with her short fiction. It didn’t take long for her to write her debut novel, The Cipher, which I’m actually in the middle of reading as I’m reviewing today’s story. Koja’s fiction is a lot more colloquial and more visceral than the work of close contemporary and fellow Michigander Thomas Ligotti; whereas Ligotti unabashedly owes a debt to Lovecraft, Koja can be considered more in line with the movies of David Cronenberg. The first decade of Koja’s career saw her often mixing horror with SF in a way that still feels novel, if only because there’s also a distinctly ’90s grunge sensibility with her early work. After a hiatus, she switched gears to writing YA and historical fiction, which might go to explain why it’s rather hard to find her stuff in bookstores these days. The Cipher and her third novel, Skin, recently got brought back into print thanks to a certain independent press, but her early work remains sadly obscure. “Reckoning” itself has hints of speculative fiction, but while it’s primarily horror, its top priority is to function as a domestic tragedy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s only been reprinted once, in the Koja collection Extremities, which itself is very out of print.

Enhancing Image

Drew is a down-on-his-luck artist, or more accurately he’s a bit too lazy and a bit too much of a drunkard for his own good. His relationship with his girlfriend Lucy turns from bad to worse as she dies in a car accident shortly after the two have a major fight. As sadly happens too often in real life, their final interaction is a bitter one, and this combined with Lucy’s death sends Drew into a beer-tinged spiral. Just when it seems like he has a chance to at least get back on his feet professionally, with an art commission, he does everything except work on said commission, including sleeping in his car on the side of the road. With his car parked outside an abandoned shed/garage (it’s not made clear which), Drew has a chance encounter with a woman who reminds him of a certain someone he knows, except she puts her hands on him seemingly with the goal of suffocating him. This ends up not being the case, though, as the woman is Lucy, suddenly alive and well again—except for the fact that her skin is a bit paler than before, and more conspicuously her eyes are now solid silver in color.

But hey, nobody’s perfect.

The reanimated Lucy, aside from looking a bit off, is otherwise the Lucy Drew had known in life. Indeed she and the others who live in the woods here can only be considered zombies by virtue of the fact that these are all people who have died before, and who all similarly have pale skin and the silvery “angel eyes.” Norah, who for all intents and purposes is the leader of the group, talks in fluent Expositionese, explaining to Drew that a) he himself is still very much alive, and b) the undead retain both their memories and personalities from before. These are not raging bloodthirsty monsters, but simply people who have gone through something pretty strange and unexplainable. The only exception is Wesley, the only man of the pack, being stanoffish and “obviously seriously strange,” but this is explained by him being a suicide, and generally he prefers to keep to himself. We’re led to expect at first that Wesley might become the story’s villain, but this is a red herring; he’s barely in it to begin with. The three main characters are Drew, Lucy, and Norah, and even then the crux of the whole story is Drew and Lucy’s complicated relationship. What do you say to someone who used to be the love of your life and who has not only been dead (from your POV) for eight months but someone you remember hurting deeply the last time you two were together?

“Reckoning” is a horror story, but only nominally; it’s not like Koja’s chief goal here is to scare or unnerve the reader. The subject matter is morbid, and in a way this is a story about zombies (although Lucy and the others explicitly don’t call themselves that), but it’s at least as much a love story. Well, it’s not a happy love story, but then how many upbeat love stories worth a damn are there? Drew and Lucy have sex maybe one too many times in such a short span, but in a way I get it. I mentioned that there’s a viseral edge to Koja’s writing, which includes candid descriptions of physical intimacy. Sex for Koja, as with Cronenberg, plays a major role in tandem with the horror, both for the sake of eroticism and also to be juxtaposed with the grimness of the surrounding material. Drew is arguably having sex with a corpse, never mind that Lucy’s angel eyes are uncanny. The eyes themselves apparently give the undead second sight, like in The Dead Zone (oh hey, it’s Cronenberg again, albeit adatping Stephen King), although Lucy and Norah are at odds as to whether these eyes let one see into the future. Believe it or not, of her early stories I would say “Reckoning” is on the tamer end. The eroticism here is pretty vanilla, compared to “Angels in Love,” the last Koja story I wrote about, which does go into fucked-up territory.

I will say that Koja’s style is not for everyone, being rather vulgar and snappy in a way that may have resulted from both the first wave of cyberpunk (already come and gone by the time Koja made her debut) and the incoming grunge era. There’s something about Koja’s early ’90s work that screams flannel and faded jeans. For better or worse, Drew being a fuck-up with no money and no direction in life sort of encapsulates the existential malaise Gen X Americans at this point in time. That Lucy and the others have each other’s company but very little else, living on the fringes of society and afraid to go out amongst “normal” people for fear of being discovered, works as like a collective counterpart to Drew’s individualistic problems. Both the individual and the group are in a rut, a post-Reagan point of post-nut clarity as the Cold War is ending with the US winning over the Soviets and yet nobody being happier for all this.

There Be Spoilers Here

Drew and Lucy’s relationship is tragic, first because of the circumstances of the latter’s death and second because the former is still alive. The bulk of “Reckoning” sees Drew caught between two worlds which happen to exist on the same land, the world of the living and the much smaller world of the undead. At some point, something will have to give: either Drew leaves Lucy and the others behind for the sake of returning to a life that was not a very good one anyway, or he dies. It’s obvious which option Koja will take, although I have to say I’m not keen on how she gets there. Word has gotten around about the not-zombies, and a small gang of young hunters goes looking in the woods, thinking they’ve gotten one when they shoot Drew dead, only to find he does not have the angel eyes they had heard of. I have a question as to what’s supposed to happen with these characters Koja pulled out of thin air, considering they committed a murder and they don’t act too concerned about having done such a thing. I also have to wonder what the hell they could expect to do if they had caught one of the undead. Is there prize money? Would they get it taxidermized? It’s still a person, so I feel like there would be a huge legal problem. These questions are none of Drew’s concern, of course, on account of him being dead at the end—or rather undead. It’s a nicely bittersweet ending, but I feel like Koja could’ve gotten us to this point more elegantly.

A Step Farther Out

This was a decent read, although it doesn’t show Koja at her best. When it comes to reprints of genre stories by women, from the time before the internet or even when the internet was in its infancy, there’s an unmistakable tendency for anthology editors to underrepresent female talent. It can be hard to gauge what’s the really good stuff in advance and do the necessary weeding-out when it comes to women writing SFF up until the past couple decades. In the case of “Reckoning” it’s understandable why it’s only been reprinted once since its initial publication, since there are at least a few Koja stories I recommend reading first.

See you next time.