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.

 

Obasan – A Poignant Inquiry into the Anguish-Filled Historical Past

““Life is so short”, I said, sighing, “the past so long, shouldn’t we turn the page and move on?” “The past is the future”, Aunt Emily shot back.”

During World War II, after Pearl Harbor, thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent, like their American counterparts, were sent to internment camps. The Canadian government of the time confiscated those displaced families' home and properties (in fact, the internment and relocation smoothly worked due to the fund raised by selling the confiscated properties). The camps were under government-forced curfews and some of the Canadian-Japanese were forcefully repatriated to Japan. It was only by April 1, 1949, the Canadian government revoked this undemocratic practice. In September 1988, the then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered federal apology (and a compensation package). Joy Kogawa’s first and most popular novel Obasan (1981) was a semi-biographical exploration of the trauma and persecution Japanese-Canadians experienced during this particular historical period. 

Born in Canada in 1935, Kogawa, her parents and older brother found themselves relocated from Vancouver to a ghost town in the interior of British Columbia (Slocan) by the year 1941. Kogawa incorporates her own story alongside other wartime experiences to build the life of Megumi Naomi Nakane. Naomi is the protagonist and narrator of the novel which begins in 1972. She is an unmarried 36-year-old teacher, called 'spinster' by one of her mischievous student. She receives news of her uncle Isamu’s death and immediately takes off to see her obasan (aunt). Obasan and Obaji (uncle) were like Naomi’s (and her elder brother Stephen’s) adoptive parents, ever since their father died due to illness and mother disappeared in Japan during wartime. 

Naomi anticipates the arrival of Stephen and Aunt Emily’s arrival for the funeral. Emily is Naomi’s mother’s sister, also an unmarried woman who has spoken up against the racism and persecution, the wartime Canadian government used against the peaceful, law-abiding Japanese Canadian families. When Naomi receives a parcel from Emily, she begins to recall her childhood experiences which turned bleak when their family began to disintegrate in 1941. She wonders about her mother and the reason she returned to Japan, and also the way uncle and aunt avoided talking about her mother’s fate. Six-year-old Naomi’s traumatic experience also includes her encounter with a pedophile neighbor (in real life, author Kogawa’s father was a pedophile which she disclosed in her memoir ‘Gently to Nagasaki’; Kogawa’s novel The Rain Ascends is about a daughter discovering that her father is a pedophile).

Obasan is a beautifully written novel, not just about the detailing of suffering inside the internment camps or systemic xenophobia, but also about grief, truth-speaking, and human’s compulsion to make sense of the past. The aunt characters are brilliantly etched: one lives in silence with stoic resolve; and the other fights for justice. Kogawa’s writing style brings out the smallest of details and she is able to express emotions using mesmerizing descriptive language (and metaphors) that bestows a dreamlike quality to the novel (especially in the childhood perspective of Naomi). The predominant theme in the novel revolves around perils of silence and repression (“Gentle mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction”, Naomi painfully remarks). Family or a democratic nation, hushing-up voices and feigning ignorance can only bring ineradicable damages. 

 

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.