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.

 

The Winter People – A Page-Turning Supernatural Thriller

Jennifer McMahon’s chilling novel, The Winter People (2013) is set in the eerie small-town of West Hall, Vermont, surrounded by dark woods and a source of weird folk tales. The collective psyche of the town’s inhabitants believes in vengeful ghosts and unexplainable monsters roaming around the creepy atmosphere of forests. And like every small-town we read about in novels, strangers rarely trespass the territory while the townspeople pass of their knowledge and sense of dread to the dwindling populace of descendants. Of course, teenagers rebel and question the elders’ belief in such ridiculous fairy-tales. It leads to unveiling the truth, which only further leads to discerning the necessity of maintaining the dark secret. The Winter People follows this basic structure, a Stephen King-like story that alternates between the past and present to explore the town’s legend of ‘sleepers’.

“The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old,” writes Sara in her diary, one of the grieving heroines of the novel. The ‘sleeper’ or ‘Winter People’, as named by Sara’s little daughter Gertie, are people who have been recalled from the dead by their beloved ones. And we inherently know nothing good can come from awakening the dead. Sara Harrison Shea’s story is set in the year 1908. She lives in her remote farmhouse (which belonged to her deceased father) with her husband Martin, and six-year-old daughter Gertie. Gertie was born after many years of failed pregnancies and loss. Sadly, the little girl too perishes in an accident and madness seems to have taken hold of Sara. In order to get her daughter back, Sara performs a ritual, the knowledge of it passed on to her by a mysterious aunt. Soon, she believes her girl has come back, whispering to her, and leaving strange notes.

In the present, Nineteen-year-old Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that her mother, Alice has disappeared. For years, Ruthie and her little sister Fawn are living off-the-grid with their mother. In her search for clues to find her mother’s whereabouts, Ruthie stumbles upon Sara Harrison Shea’s diary (actually it’s published into a book by Sara’s niece Amelia years after her aunt’s grim fate; people read it as a good horror story, although Amelia believed it to be true and adjudges that some of the diary’s ‘important’ pages are missing). Ruthie also comes across other mysterious items in her mom’s closet which pushes her to take a short trip with boyfriend Buzz. In a parallel story, also set in the present, a grieving wife and artist named Katherine has recently moved to West Hall. Her photographer husband, Gary is recently killed in a car accident, supposedly shooting for a wedding. But she discovers there was no wedding and learns that Gary visited a woman in a café in West Hall. Katherine is desperate to understand the reason for her husband's visit. These two stories in the present are of course connected to the strange life and death of Sara Harrison.

The first-half of ‘Winter People’ is really absorbing, transplanting us to the snow-covered small-town Vermont setting. The construction and execution of atmospheric horror in the early chapters is beyond excellent. The description of wintry woods, the arduous farm-life, the pale ghostly figure spotted between tree trunks, tales of  people disappearing without a trace, and all other chilling elements are superbly built up by Jennifer McMahon. Sara’s tale is full of dark foreboding and heart-breaking developments, and it’s easily the best among the three story-lines. The novel’s major themes deal with mother-daughter relationship which is well-realized in both the timelines plus the hold grief has over the humans. The characters are also very well developed (especially Ruthie Sara, and Katherine). Moreover, the clues and red-herrings deeply engages us. However, the novel sort of implodes in the last-third, as guns are brought into play. I particularly abhorred the Candace character whose actions and behavior are jarring enough to adversely impact the novel’s tone. The interactions also become very stiff in these parts, sounding too formulaic. The conclusion was also not convincing, and all these factors considerably bring down the novel’s quality (because the first-half was so propulsive). Still, it will be a captivating page-turner for mystery and thriller aficionados.

The Fisherman – An Emotionally Resonant Horror Fiction

“Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.”

John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016) was adorned with couple of adjectives – ‘Lovecraftian’ & ‘Literary Horror’ – that pushed me to go through it. Moreover, Mr. Langan was no stranger to horror writing, his spectacular talent is evident in his collection of weird horror tales titled, ‘The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies’ (haven’t yet read his first novel ‘House of Windows’.) Still, the aforementioned adjectives combined with other superlative ones like ‘transcendent’ or ‘cosmic horror’ has become such a cliché nowadays that I also had some skepticism in approaching it. But the pathos and irony Langan employs to draw his bereaved characters easily pulled me in.

The Fisherman is set in the late 1990s, in the mountains of Catskills (in southeastern New York State) that’s punctuated with creeks often frequented by fisherman. The tale unfurls from the perspective of Abe (“Don’t call me Abraham; call me Abe. Though it’s what my ma named me, I’ve never liked Abraham”, our narrator says in the novel’s opening lines), a widower from small-town who is working for IBM. Married late in life to Marie, whom he lost her to cancer with which she was diagnosed shortly after their return from honeymoon, Abe now finds comfort only in fishing, a hobby he picked out of nowhere. Fishing has helped him to keep his job and ascend from the void of alcoholism. The six-feet-seven Dan is Abe’s co-worker, a young man with a wife and twin kids. What eventually brings these men together is not their work, but their grief. Dan loses his family to an accident and few months after Dan’s profound loss, Abe extends to him an invitation to go fishing together. Dan has had a remote interest due to the fishing trips with his father.  

Fishing with Abe, however, brings Dan a sort of peace or at least a distraction. Every weekend, the two men search for known as well as uncharted streams around Catskills areas to fish. One day, Dan proposes that they go to ‘Dutchman’s Creek’. A friendly cook named Howard of Herman’s Diner (surely a nod to H.P. Lovecraft and Melville) hearing about Abe & Dan’s plans warns them against going to the stream. He then tells a pretty long tale about strange events in a village in the beginning of 20^th century that was persecuted by a dark, mysterious force known as ‘Der Fisher’ aka ‘The Fisherman’. The village was later destroyed (the people displaced) to create a reservoir which is now called as the ‘Dutchman’s Creek’. The novel’s strongest second part chronicles the experiences of a Dutch immigrant named Rainer Schimdt, a former academic for some inscrutable reason works as a stone mason during the construction of reservoir. Part III follows Abe & Dan’s unsettling trip to the creek, where they encounter come across unreal and unfathomable things that promises to provide an easy solution to their loss.

John Langan

John Langan utilizes the conceit of nested stories very well, one restrained and realistic while the other is steeped in occult. It is interesting to note how the personal narratives of Abe & Dan intersect with a more expansive cultural and historical narrative. As for the ‘cosmic horror’ elements are concerned, Langan mostly gets it right as he doesn’t fully give into the temptation of explaining in detail the monsters’ physicality or its realm’s reality. Langan’s horrific imagery, conjured by his lively prose, does allow space for readers’ imagination to come up with their own image of the ‘unspeakable horror’. I also found it interesting how the Dutchman tale is not told when Howard recollects it. The story unfolds only when Abe sits and writes down what he heard at the diner. This leads to Abe later questioning if Howard has actually said all the things he has written. Hence a strange resonance forms between the two stories, which only deepens the work altogether.

While Lovecraft’s influence is plainly evident, Langan also frequently alludes to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Bible stories. The novel’s ruminative pace in the last part and the toying with language definitely lacks the thrills of the Rainer Schmidt story. Nevertheless, the author maintains the sense of emotional discomfort up until the final passages. Whether Langan is narrating the tale through Abe or Rainer or Jacob, he deeply deals with the issues of loss and grief so as to foreground the human experiences more than the preternatural incidents. Overall, The Fisherman is a grimly fascinating horror/adventure where insurmountable griefs cause as much damage as the luring dark forces.