The Cipher – A Challenging and Incredibly Bizarre Horror

“…what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching dark of my own emptiness forever?”

American author Kathe Koja’s The Cipher (1991) was part of, or you could say it spear-headed, the bunch of weird horror fiction that emerged in the early 1990s (published by Dell Publishing under the print of Abyss Books). The paperback original horrors appeared under ‘Abyss’ were considered to be antithetical to the main-stream horror fiction of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, VC Andrews, etc (Mr. King however praised the titles published under the Abyss Books). The weird horror authors (mostly unknown), who gravitated towards hallucinatory prose and existential tension, penned stories that elude easy categorization. Readers who feel gross-out horror are not their cup of tea would have a particularly hard time going through this line of books.

Koja’s The Cipher actually doesn’t have a heavy dose of yuckiness as some of the splatter-punk horror genre novels of the 1980s. Yet Koja’s unpolished and relentlessly bleak prose makes us squirm with unease. The horrific phenomenon at the center of The Cipher is unexplainable. It’s a black hole, I mean literally. The novel’s characters aren’t the clean, all-American suburbanites, but disaffected young slackers, plagued with fear and anxiety, and living in an exceedingly dirty tenement. The book opens with Nicholas, a wanna-be poet and video-store clerk cajoled by Nakota, the bitchy wanna-be artist stuck in the shitty job of waitressing, to visit the mysterious hole in the storage closet of Nicholas’ broken-down apartment building. Nakota aka Shirke is cunning and manipulative, but Nicholas deeply loves her, knowing very well that his love may never be reciprocated. He knows she wouldn’t do be anywhere near him if not for that hole.

Nicholas describes the hole as, “Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more.” Nakota names it ‘Funhole’ and it becomes the focus of her obsession, just as Nicholas is obsessed with Nakota. She wants to find out the reason for the hole’s existence or what it can do. She experiments with a jar of insects, throwing it down the black hole, only to discover the strange mutations before its death. She sends a mouse inside, witnessing the grim results. Finally, Nakota pressures Nicholas to borrow a camcorder from the video store. She lowers the camcorder and gets a recording which is quite psychedelic. Nakota can’t stop watching the video, and the ensuing confrontation with Nicholas results in Nicholas accidentally dipping his hand in the Funhole. And things turn weirder when Nakota unveils the strangely symbiotic relationship between Nicholas and the hole.

The Cipher contains what critics call ‘stream of conscious writing’, which is full of mordant sense of humor (“If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap”) and detailed description of all things unclean and unsavory. The novel actually fascinated me for the way Koja conjures the implacable climate of unpleasantness. The author makes us strongly feel the mood of decay and smell the odors, possibly emanating from the Funhole. There are lots of fiery verbal exchanges which some times turn violent. The sexual acts are described in as much joyless (and queasy) manner as possible. Although Nicholas is not a very likeable character, you could feel his desperation as he crawls between the claustrophobic spaces, hungering for love and preparing for that inevitable doom. The novel does feel too long, especially in the episodes related to Nakota & Malcolm’s gang of agitators. And Nakota was not only an unlikable character, but remains a cipher throughout (described as the woman with ‘a special selfishness that can barely recognize the existence of others’). Nevertheless, this tale of ‘evil space’ is a smart allegory on obsession, unrequited love, human frailty and the emptiness of modern life.