The story starts in media res Nicholas, with his goth love interest Nakota, have already discovered the Funhole. The Cipher follows Nicholas, a poster child for Generation X: slacker, sarcastic ironist, deadbeat wage slave for a video rental store. If you are like me, you are also in luck, because Meerkat Press has republished The Cipherby Kathe Koja, a long out-of-print cult classic from Dell’s flagship horror imprint, Abyss. I am looking for the book equivalent of Silent Hill, where the tension is psychological, and the terror symbolic. This horror works only in allegories, not facts instead of Lovecraft and pulp, its direct inspirations are literary, Kafka and Beckett.
But whereas Weird stories often have some sort of explanation or background for their horror, whether it be extraterrestrial old gods, or dimension-jumping angels, the suggestive horror I look for has no explanations.
This is something like Weird fiction (all grandchildren of Lovecraft), which has had a resurgence in recent times. Eerie paranormal comes in spades, there is no shortage of splatter, but that horror which disturbs by suggestion, that scares with subtlety, is rarer. One of my favorites.Despite the proliferation and acceptance of horror in the mainstream, there are specific kinds that are hard to find. The sentences are structured nearly stream of consciousness-style, so you really just have to abide by the rhythm of the words.Īll in all, fantastic novel. It's not a skimmable book, which I thought was really cool. I loved how Koja told her story, the conversational style of the narration had me reading slowly, reading at the pace she dictates with the punctuation to keep me in time.
Real, scummy people scraping by and getting in way over their heads.Īnd then, there was the Funhole itself, a weird, terrifying central conceit that makes for the book's high concept hook, then drives it into surreal and artsy new territories. I loved (and hated) the characters, but understood their internal logic. There was just something so grimy about it. Anywhere, here are my scattered thoughts: I may just be in the honeymoon phase here, but I think I'd even say it might be in my top ten favorite horror novels of all time. I had a feeling of pure joy reading it, like I was discovering an original- reading something for the first time that'd come and go out of my life until the very end. I just finished it the other day, and I can't stop thinking about it.
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