[Review] The Cipher, by Kathe Koja (1991)
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booknook(cross-posted from my journal in full)
Here I am, fighting a cold on a Sunday, trying to review a book that haunted me for decades. I'm not sure I can do it justice, but at the least you should come away with an understanding of why this early nineties horror novel infected the minds of so many readers, and how it got its claws into mine. It's probably more of an exorcism than a review.
In 1991, Dell Publishing started its Abyss imprint (spearheaded by editor/writer Jeanne Cavalos) in an attempt to revitalize the stale horror genre. From their point of view, 80s horror had been creating big names and been popular for long enough that clichés and re-used tropes had begun to form, and you could feel sort of cozy when sitting down with the newest horror bestseller. Abyss' mission statement said: "It's not about haunted houses or evil children or ancient Indian burial grounds. We've all read those books, and we all know their plots by heart." Instead, their line of books would be "about people, and the darkness we all carry within us." What they meant by that was an emphasis on the disturbing, experimental, and psychological, and they didn't shy away from sex, either. They wanted to offer something new, and they gave a voice to underground authors - some of which were quickly forgotten, but others have remained quite familiar: Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, Tanith Lee's Dark Dance, Melanie Tem's Prodigal, and Brian Hodge's Nightlife all premiered at Dell/Abyss. It was also the first time of Stephen King asking a publisher if he could do a blurb for them.
Dell/Abyss kicked it off with Kathe Koja's 1991 The Cipher. And as if they wanted to make really clear that they were serious about this, they chose artwork by Marshall Arisman for the cover. Arisman (1938—2022) was an American artist mainly famous for his nightmarishly distorted, expressionistic illustrations, citing Francis Bacon as one of his influences. The illustration for TIME magazine's 1981 cover story, "The Curse of Violent Crime", actually earned them cancelled subscriptions, as Arisman explained in a 2017 VICE interview: "[The parents] said their kids were scared." His multimedia installation The Last Tribe dealt with nuclear annihilation. Not all of his work was that menacing, but the menacing stuff is probably what he's most memorable for, as it creates such a visceral reaction.
The original 1991 cover looked like this. In early 1994—I was 15 at the time—, Heyne published a German translation (called Schwarzer Abgrund, "black chasm") and apparently thought, fuck all that overlaid art, we're going with just the painting and only add the lettering.
That fucking cover gave me nightmares.
And yet, I couldn't stop looking at it.
That grossed-out fascination is kind of an encapsulation of what The Cipher does to you.
~*~
Our protagonist, Nicholas, is a would-be poet working at a video store whose life goes nowhere. He only writes when he's drunk, he mixes with artist types but believes he isn't creating anything worthwhile himself. He lives in a grungy city, in a run-down apartment, and cannot bring himself to end his unhealthy relationship with his sometimes-girlfriend Nakota. Nakota has the drive and eagerness for fame that he does not possess, and it's Nakota who first discovers the Funhole: an unnatural, seemingly bottomless black hole in the floor of their building's grimey storage hall, black as in absence, a void. They don't know what it is or where it came from. One day, it just was.
Nakota, first fascinated, then increasingly obsessed, starts doing experiments, with Nicholas as the hanger-on and sometimes accomplice. They lower things into the hole, starting with a jar of insects, and it escalates from there. Whatever they feed to the Funhole, comes back twisted. Wrong. It's like the hole leads to a different dimension that warps everything caught in its strange radiation. Eventually, in a written precursor to found footage horror, they lower a camcorder into the Funhole to make a video. Turns out that this video is different for everyone, never repeating... except for Nicholas. In fact, the Funhole seems to not do anything unless he is around. For a reason he does not understand, he seems to be the catalyst. Which really annoys Nakota, because why the fuck should passive loser Nicholas get to be special when she's the only one fit to be the Funhole's priestess?
Nakota pulls other artists into their circle, some of which bring their own installations near the Funhole, and she begins to create a cult of sorts among the local poseurs, first watching the video herself ("You're watching that like porno", Nicholas accuses her at one point,) then sharing it around. Deciding who gets to see the Funhole, even believing she ought to throw herself right into it.
But it's Nicholas who eventually trips and accidentally dips his hand into the hole. It creates an open wound in his palm, a miniature hole that festers and weeps and sometimes it builds his blood into crystalline structures, or oozes not blood at all but some strange plasma.
The hole grows.
And everything slowly gets worse, and worse, and worse.
~*~
The Cipher is a novel about decay. It's fucking gross.
It has body horror, sure, and the cosmic horror of the Funhole itself, and how these horrors mingle. But that's relatively easy to handle, because it still has some air of mystery about it. The Funhole is a mystery. Experimenting with it is awful, you know it can only end in something ugly and stomach-churning, but it also stirs your curiosity. It has a draw to it, a siren's song that both Nakota and Nicholas hear constantly. You don't want to look. But it's not really a contest: morbid fascination wins every time. It won over Nicholas, and it won over me, the reader. Whenever the strange warp of the Funhole occurs, especially in the early chapters when it's being experimented with, the book sucks you in. This kind of decay has an allure to it.
The rot of everyday life is harder to stomach. Opportunities not taken. Relationships you can't let go of, even though they are clearly bad for you. Living in a mess, and letting yourself become a mess. Having to shit and piss. Unwanted erections. Drug use. Bad sex. Puking, either from psychological distress or because you've again been drinking too much. As Nicholas says at one point, We are our own best worst friends.
In a 2020 interview, Koja explains that the novel "came out of a fictive atmosphere that you could think of as a petri dish, or tidewater: entropy, loud music, profound loneliness, the smell of lukewarm beer, the sourceless heat of ambition, the dimness that is never truly dark and never quite light. Detritus, spills, 4am. Dread. All of that is in there." This book is dirty, grimey, wading in its own filth. It makes you feel like you need a shower. And it is exclusively written from the point-of-view of Nicholas, who struggles with feelings of self-loathing, depression, and helplessness. (Anger and a bit of a mean streak are there, too, but those don't really come out until the Funhole begins to change him.) "You can get used to being wrong all the time," Nicholas explains, "it takes all the responsibility out of things." You are locked inside his head, with him every step of the way, and he has his good sides, but he also has a lot of traits that you will probably loathe. Just like you will probably loathe Nakota, for different reasons.
It's fairly obvious that Kathe Koja did not care whether readers would like her characters. She only cared whether they felt real. And they do. As she wrote in her foreword to the new 2012 digital edition, "Everybody said that they disliked Nakota, and that they knew someone exactly, just exactly, like her." You might see part of your life in this book, even if that life lies in the past: The web of manipulative relationships portrayed therein, or the art scene inhabitants looking for meaning or thrills or approval, or Nicholas' relentless spiraling. And as one of her greatest strengths, in my opinion, Koja treats both the ugly and the transcendant as equally worthy of description. Love can be poetic. So can the grotesque. It's a psychedelic stream of consciousness, and utterly, unapologetically weird.
There are downsides to this, of course. With Nicholas being the sole narrator, we have to listen to his voice from beginning to end, and his self-loathing and pining and questioning can really grind you down. The book as a whole is really bleak. You either are lucky/unlucky enough to vibe with that (even if that vibing can be more a kind of begrudging acceptance sometimes) or you can't stand it at all, and I won't fault anyone for not liking it. I think the novel could easily have lost a third of its pages and still hit all the important stops. A lot of readers quit when the Funhole exploration takes the backseat to the psychological and social ramifications that it has on the people coming into contact with it. Koja has an intriguing concept and some powerful ideas, but she hammers these ideas in repeatedly to reach novel length (or so it felt to me). Also, occasionally the point she's making is very on the nose. A lot of horror draws on the contradictory pull of Eros and Thanatos, the pleasure principle and the death drive, so when thinking about the Funhole literally gives Nicholas an erection, the first time that happens it's interesting (self-destruction as masturbation and/or a way to feel alive?) - then it comes up a second and a third time and I'm like, okay, yeah, we've been through this, calm it down a little.
That being said: There's enough depth in this that the story, or parts of it, will stay with you long after you've read it. Its grossness and occasional bursts of violence are there for seasoning, as slow-growing consequences of the characters' decisions or apathy - not as shock value for its own sake. The novel refuses to explain the Funhole, but the dynamics surrounding it do more than just hint at interpretations, and a lot of them have to do with art itself. Is it worth letting yourself get eaten for your art? What if your fans see you as something you are not, your artwork as saying something you never intended? Can there be dignity in acknowledging that you are heading for destruction? Last but not least, how do you bury a love that should have died a long time ago?
I have the feeling that a novel like The Cipher could have only come out in the Nineties, when the novelties of the Eighties gave way to disillusionment and New Wave gave way to Grunge. It is a time capsule of sorts, and not just because it refers to video stores and camcorders and Faces of Death, and takes for granted that readers know about landline phone cords, which led some younger person to write a review in 2020 containing my favourite befuddled complaint: "At one point Nicholas is making a phone call with his phone balanced on his hip? I try to conjure this image and I just can't. How is it even possible? Is he a contortionist?"
~*~
I can't tell you if you "should" read this. There are a lot of books out there that are an acquired taste, and I believe The Cipher is one of these. It's not "fun" to read. But to me, it was worth reading, like being proud of a grotesque collector's item when you can see the beauty in it. It made a lot of waves when it came out, even won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. For a while, after it went out of print, prices went up to a ridiculous degree. I bought my used paperback copy at a literature collectors website a few years ago, with yellowed pages and a cover so torn that half of it came off in pieces. Which I found kind of fitting, to be honest.
Thankfully, Meerkat Press published a new paperback edition in 2020. (There was also Centipede Press' 2022 hardcover limited edition, but that sold out really quickly.) Regarding the ebook editions, they include some shoddy editing and formatting, so maybe try to steer away from digital copies.
Here I am, fighting a cold on a Sunday, trying to review a book that haunted me for decades. I'm not sure I can do it justice, but at the least you should come away with an understanding of why this early nineties horror novel infected the minds of so many readers, and how it got its claws into mine. It's probably more of an exorcism than a review.
In 1991, Dell Publishing started its Abyss imprint (spearheaded by editor/writer Jeanne Cavalos) in an attempt to revitalize the stale horror genre. From their point of view, 80s horror had been creating big names and been popular for long enough that clichés and re-used tropes had begun to form, and you could feel sort of cozy when sitting down with the newest horror bestseller. Abyss' mission statement said: "It's not about haunted houses or evil children or ancient Indian burial grounds. We've all read those books, and we all know their plots by heart." Instead, their line of books would be "about people, and the darkness we all carry within us." What they meant by that was an emphasis on the disturbing, experimental, and psychological, and they didn't shy away from sex, either. They wanted to offer something new, and they gave a voice to underground authors - some of which were quickly forgotten, but others have remained quite familiar: Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, Tanith Lee's Dark Dance, Melanie Tem's Prodigal, and Brian Hodge's Nightlife all premiered at Dell/Abyss. It was also the first time of Stephen King asking a publisher if he could do a blurb for them.
Dell/Abyss kicked it off with Kathe Koja's 1991 The Cipher. And as if they wanted to make really clear that they were serious about this, they chose artwork by Marshall Arisman for the cover. Arisman (1938—2022) was an American artist mainly famous for his nightmarishly distorted, expressionistic illustrations, citing Francis Bacon as one of his influences. The illustration for TIME magazine's 1981 cover story, "The Curse of Violent Crime", actually earned them cancelled subscriptions, as Arisman explained in a 2017 VICE interview: "[The parents] said their kids were scared." His multimedia installation The Last Tribe dealt with nuclear annihilation. Not all of his work was that menacing, but the menacing stuff is probably what he's most memorable for, as it creates such a visceral reaction.
The original 1991 cover looked like this. In early 1994—I was 15 at the time—, Heyne published a German translation (called Schwarzer Abgrund, "black chasm") and apparently thought, fuck all that overlaid art, we're going with just the painting and only add the lettering.
That fucking cover gave me nightmares.
And yet, I couldn't stop looking at it.
That grossed-out fascination is kind of an encapsulation of what The Cipher does to you.
~*~
Our protagonist, Nicholas, is a would-be poet working at a video store whose life goes nowhere. He only writes when he's drunk, he mixes with artist types but believes he isn't creating anything worthwhile himself. He lives in a grungy city, in a run-down apartment, and cannot bring himself to end his unhealthy relationship with his sometimes-girlfriend Nakota. Nakota has the drive and eagerness for fame that he does not possess, and it's Nakota who first discovers the Funhole: an unnatural, seemingly bottomless black hole in the floor of their building's grimey storage hall, black as in absence, a void. They don't know what it is or where it came from. One day, it just was.
Nakota, first fascinated, then increasingly obsessed, starts doing experiments, with Nicholas as the hanger-on and sometimes accomplice. They lower things into the hole, starting with a jar of insects, and it escalates from there. Whatever they feed to the Funhole, comes back twisted. Wrong. It's like the hole leads to a different dimension that warps everything caught in its strange radiation. Eventually, in a written precursor to found footage horror, they lower a camcorder into the Funhole to make a video. Turns out that this video is different for everyone, never repeating... except for Nicholas. In fact, the Funhole seems to not do anything unless he is around. For a reason he does not understand, he seems to be the catalyst. Which really annoys Nakota, because why the fuck should passive loser Nicholas get to be special when she's the only one fit to be the Funhole's priestess?
Nakota pulls other artists into their circle, some of which bring their own installations near the Funhole, and she begins to create a cult of sorts among the local poseurs, first watching the video herself ("You're watching that like porno", Nicholas accuses her at one point,) then sharing it around. Deciding who gets to see the Funhole, even believing she ought to throw herself right into it.
But it's Nicholas who eventually trips and accidentally dips his hand into the hole. It creates an open wound in his palm, a miniature hole that festers and weeps and sometimes it builds his blood into crystalline structures, or oozes not blood at all but some strange plasma.
The hole grows.
And everything slowly gets worse, and worse, and worse.
~*~
The Cipher is a novel about decay. It's fucking gross.
It has body horror, sure, and the cosmic horror of the Funhole itself, and how these horrors mingle. But that's relatively easy to handle, because it still has some air of mystery about it. The Funhole is a mystery. Experimenting with it is awful, you know it can only end in something ugly and stomach-churning, but it also stirs your curiosity. It has a draw to it, a siren's song that both Nakota and Nicholas hear constantly. You don't want to look. But it's not really a contest: morbid fascination wins every time. It won over Nicholas, and it won over me, the reader. Whenever the strange warp of the Funhole occurs, especially in the early chapters when it's being experimented with, the book sucks you in. This kind of decay has an allure to it.
The rot of everyday life is harder to stomach. Opportunities not taken. Relationships you can't let go of, even though they are clearly bad for you. Living in a mess, and letting yourself become a mess. Having to shit and piss. Unwanted erections. Drug use. Bad sex. Puking, either from psychological distress or because you've again been drinking too much. As Nicholas says at one point, We are our own best worst friends.
In a 2020 interview, Koja explains that the novel "came out of a fictive atmosphere that you could think of as a petri dish, or tidewater: entropy, loud music, profound loneliness, the smell of lukewarm beer, the sourceless heat of ambition, the dimness that is never truly dark and never quite light. Detritus, spills, 4am. Dread. All of that is in there." This book is dirty, grimey, wading in its own filth. It makes you feel like you need a shower. And it is exclusively written from the point-of-view of Nicholas, who struggles with feelings of self-loathing, depression, and helplessness. (Anger and a bit of a mean streak are there, too, but those don't really come out until the Funhole begins to change him.) "You can get used to being wrong all the time," Nicholas explains, "it takes all the responsibility out of things." You are locked inside his head, with him every step of the way, and he has his good sides, but he also has a lot of traits that you will probably loathe. Just like you will probably loathe Nakota, for different reasons.
It's fairly obvious that Kathe Koja did not care whether readers would like her characters. She only cared whether they felt real. And they do. As she wrote in her foreword to the new 2012 digital edition, "Everybody said that they disliked Nakota, and that they knew someone exactly, just exactly, like her." You might see part of your life in this book, even if that life lies in the past: The web of manipulative relationships portrayed therein, or the art scene inhabitants looking for meaning or thrills or approval, or Nicholas' relentless spiraling. And as one of her greatest strengths, in my opinion, Koja treats both the ugly and the transcendant as equally worthy of description. Love can be poetic. So can the grotesque. It's a psychedelic stream of consciousness, and utterly, unapologetically weird.
There are downsides to this, of course. With Nicholas being the sole narrator, we have to listen to his voice from beginning to end, and his self-loathing and pining and questioning can really grind you down. The book as a whole is really bleak. You either are lucky/unlucky enough to vibe with that (even if that vibing can be more a kind of begrudging acceptance sometimes) or you can't stand it at all, and I won't fault anyone for not liking it. I think the novel could easily have lost a third of its pages and still hit all the important stops. A lot of readers quit when the Funhole exploration takes the backseat to the psychological and social ramifications that it has on the people coming into contact with it. Koja has an intriguing concept and some powerful ideas, but she hammers these ideas in repeatedly to reach novel length (or so it felt to me). Also, occasionally the point she's making is very on the nose. A lot of horror draws on the contradictory pull of Eros and Thanatos, the pleasure principle and the death drive, so when thinking about the Funhole literally gives Nicholas an erection, the first time that happens it's interesting (self-destruction as masturbation and/or a way to feel alive?) - then it comes up a second and a third time and I'm like, okay, yeah, we've been through this, calm it down a little.
That being said: There's enough depth in this that the story, or parts of it, will stay with you long after you've read it. Its grossness and occasional bursts of violence are there for seasoning, as slow-growing consequences of the characters' decisions or apathy - not as shock value for its own sake. The novel refuses to explain the Funhole, but the dynamics surrounding it do more than just hint at interpretations, and a lot of them have to do with art itself. Is it worth letting yourself get eaten for your art? What if your fans see you as something you are not, your artwork as saying something you never intended? Can there be dignity in acknowledging that you are heading for destruction? Last but not least, how do you bury a love that should have died a long time ago?
I have the feeling that a novel like The Cipher could have only come out in the Nineties, when the novelties of the Eighties gave way to disillusionment and New Wave gave way to Grunge. It is a time capsule of sorts, and not just because it refers to video stores and camcorders and Faces of Death, and takes for granted that readers know about landline phone cords, which led some younger person to write a review in 2020 containing my favourite befuddled complaint: "At one point Nicholas is making a phone call with his phone balanced on his hip? I try to conjure this image and I just can't. How is it even possible? Is he a contortionist?"
~*~
I can't tell you if you "should" read this. There are a lot of books out there that are an acquired taste, and I believe The Cipher is one of these. It's not "fun" to read. But to me, it was worth reading, like being proud of a grotesque collector's item when you can see the beauty in it. It made a lot of waves when it came out, even won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. For a while, after it went out of print, prices went up to a ridiculous degree. I bought my used paperback copy at a literature collectors website a few years ago, with yellowed pages and a cover so torn that half of it came off in pieces. Which I found kind of fitting, to be honest.
Thankfully, Meerkat Press published a new paperback edition in 2020. (There was also Centipede Press' 2022 hardcover limited edition, but that sold out really quickly.) Regarding the ebook editions, they include some shoddy editing and formatting, so maybe try to steer away from digital copies.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-13 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-13 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-13 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-16 10:47 am (UTC)Ooh, Stephen King, I remember browsing some of his novels during visits at relatives - before they noticed and took them out of my hands, saying this was in no way child-appropriate. (I was, what, twelve?) And they were right, because of course I had happened to read a part of "Misery" that gave me nightmares for a week, lol. So this cemented in me the wish to conquer my fear of this book and what came out of it in the end was that I read lots and lots of King horror novels in the 90s. "The Cipher", in comparison, was... just really out there. I don't think I got it, any of it. I just didn't have the context, as a teenager who back then hadn't even found his goth scene yet. So I'm glad I was able to reread the novel now that I'm older.
And to be honest with you... despite loving horror, there's still movies I refuse to watch and books I refuse to read, and usually it's because they're just not my thing (e.g. zombies or torture porn) but sometimes it's also a kind of superstitious dread - "House of Leaves" has been on my shelf for years and I am not sure I will ever read it!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-17 12:37 am (UTC)I was very startled when she jumped into YA some time back - no clue what she's up to now, but I thought her YA books were terrific, punchy and beautifully written without getting too scary.
And I am similar with horror stuff. I have also hesitated to read House of Leaves. I'm sufficiently superstitious that I refuse to go near a Ouija board despite being somewhat woo. XD Or perhaps because of it! I'm pretty sure the movie The Ring would straight-up kill me. XD
no subject
Date: 2024-10-21 01:40 pm (UTC)Oh boy, The Ring (the remake, not the japanese original movie) traumatized me due to a jump-scare very early on. I still close my eyes when I rewatch it and get close to that moment. I like the atmosphere and the photography a lot in this, I think it's a very good movie, but I can never get over that one scene. Maybe now, 20 years later, I might even find it laughable and over-the-top? But I'm not willing to take that risk. Please do not watch it! XD
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Date: 2024-10-15 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-16 10:49 am (UTC)