The Cipher

Fun fact: I'd planned this weeks ago, penciling in The Cipher on the calendar, the top of a list of the first eight books from Dell Abyss, that this post would go up January 6; as it happens, today, the sixth is Kathe Koja's birthday. That's some pretty cool synchronicity there.
Now, on with the post:

I've tried this before, but I'm going to give it another go for 2018. 

This time I have a plan and structure and God knows I need that. One book a week. Post goes up on Saturday. And I've started at the beginning: Kathe Koja's The Cipher. The Cipher was the novel chosen to lead off the imprint, and it does with a bang.

Dell Abyss liner editor  Jeanne Cavelos said "We'd had too many stories about haunted houses and evil children and ancient Indian burial grounds.”

What was needed was something different. Different it is.

Nicholas and his not girlfriend Nakota have discovered a spot, a hole in a store room in his apartment building. They call it “The Funhole.” Like a vantablack puddle, the hole doesn't go to the floor below, but somewhere else. Nakota experiments by lowering things into it. Bugs. A mouse. None of them come back alive, or unchanged. This drives Nakota to up the stakes by lowering a corpse's hand into it. The results from that grisly attempt inspire her to put a video camera into The Funhole. The resulting footage is different for Nicholas, and what Nakota and everyone else see changes relative to the viewer. Nicholas eventually ends up putting one of his hands into The Funhole, and everything pretty much goes to Hell from there.

Nicholas and Nakota aren't particularly likable people. But I knew them. The poet working at the video store. The bar waitress- artist. The smell of stale beer and cigarettes. Re-reading this reminded me just how awesomely fucked up the nineties were. This time, I wasn't seeing the horror of what Nicholas becomes because of The Funhole, who Nakota becomes because of it. This was Nostalgia. Not just for the first time I'd encountered The Funhole, but for who I was when I did. Stale beer. Clove cigarettes. My old leather jacket. The poets and painters and actors and madmen who occupied my world.
I don't miss any of that.  Not really. 
Except maybe at 3am, when the cats have woke me up for a snack and I think there was a time when I'd be getting home at that hour.

Original publication date: February 1991.
Awards: 1992 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Horror Novel. Locus Award Best First Novel.

Availability: Paperback was reprinted with a different cover, but both editions are currently out of print and commanding pretty good prices on the secondary market. Roadswell Editions released an affordable ($3.99) e-book, available in several platforms. I actually have the Android edition that I read on my phone when I'm in the mood and away from my bookshelf. When they released the ebook, they made a trailer style commercial for it:

This is probably the closest we'll ever get to The Cipher: The Movie.