The Cipher by Kathe Koja

There’s nothing at the center of Kathe Koja’s novel The Cipher. Even less than nothing—a
kind of black hole that has opened up spontaneously in the floor of a neglected second
story storage room in Nicholas’s down-and-out apartment building.

It’s hard to describe, because there isn’t much to describe. “Black. Not darkness, not
the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure
black and the sense of pulsation, especially when
you look at it too closely, the sense of something
not living but alive, not even something but some
—process.” Here, amidst the tools, containers and
clutter of the storage room, a pathway to an
alternative universe has opened up, and no one
has noticed.

Only Nicholas and his cantankerous sometime-
girlfriend Nakota are aware of this apparent warp
in the space-time continuum, and they aren't
telling anyone what they have found. At first, they
treat the black hole as little more than a joke, even
assign cute or scatological names to the looming
void. Others might consult Stephen Hawking for a
professional verdict, but for Nicholas and Nakota,
it is just their private Funhole.

They aren't scientists. Nicholas works in a video
store, and is an aspiring poet who no longer aspires.
Nakota is a cocktail waitress who is too rude and
raggedy to work at anything more than the lowest dives. But even losers are curious,
and eventually Nakota decides to conduct “experiments” to determine the properties
and contents of their beguiling Funhole.

First she exposes a jar of insects to the black hole, and then moves on to a captive mouse.
None of these creatures returns unscathed from their journey, but instead suffer strange
mutations, akin to what you might find after a few core meltdowns and several generations
of genetic anarchy.

Nicholas is frightened by the strange powers of the Funhole, but Nakota is obsessed with
discovering what goes on inside its abyss. Her next experiment involves sending a
camcorder into its dark inside to capture video footage. The resulting film is strangely
mesmerizing—Koja anticipates “The Entertainment,” the fatally addictive videotape that
plays a key role in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published five years after The
Cipher. A vaguely-defined, but ominous figure shows up in the Funhole video, but
many details of the film change with repeated viewings. Yet no matter what the audience
sees, the experience of watching the video turns into a compulsive ritual for those exposed
to it.

Nakota wants to push onward with their exploration of
the Funhole. Nicholas is reluctant, but he becomes an
unwilling part of the mystery after a storage room mishap
leads him to place his right arm into its abyss. After
retrieving his limb, he notices a small wound in the
palm of his hand. Over time, the wound grows, and—
horror of horror!—begins to take on the appearance of
mini-Funhole, now a kind of permanent stigmata on
Nicholas’s body.

At this juncture in the novel—some seventy pages into
The Cipher—Koja shifts gears. Readers are expecting a
descent into the Funhole. Just as Alice tumbled into the
rabbit hole, and Jules Verne took his characters down
to the center of the Earth, we anticipate that Nicholas
and Nakota will make the inevitable leap into their black
void. Recall that science fiction and fantasy tales evolved
out of travel literature. So what genre author would build
a novel around a mysterious hole, and never make the plunge?

But Koja is not your typical genre writer. Perhaps you could tell that just by glancing at
her bio, which notes that she previously worked as a "bonsai lumberjack, an oyster cowboy,
and a freelance criminologist." But readers also discover her idiosyncrasies via the defining
themes of her stories, which deviate markedly from the staples of genre fiction. In the
course of The Cipher, we gradually discover that her main concern is less with the Funhole
and more with the people drawn into its orbit. She has no interest in emulating Stephen
Hawking, and serving up a theoretical explanation of the mystery she posits, and is
equally unwilling to emulate Jules Verne and give us a guided tour of the unknown.
Instead, she adopts the modus operandi of a psychological investigator, deeply attuned
to the ways different individuals react to transcendent experiences.

"My characters are generally people who are driven and obsessed in some way, and
comfortable at extremes—of behavior, of emotion, of belief—that would make most
people uneasy," Koja has explained. She sees a connection between this tendency and
her own spiritual quest—which started out under the auspices of the Catholic faith, then
led to a separation from the Church, and finally a return to religious belief. "One of the
great advantages of being born a Catholic— at least for me—is a hands-on, matter-of-fact
acceptance of mystery," Koja has commented, "of the limbo district where the corporeal
intersects with the Divine." This manifests itself, again and again in her works, as an
intense focus on, in her words, "transformation, or more properly transcendence: when
we will to be more than we are, what do we do?"

Readers with more than a passing acquaintance with theology will also grasp the
rigorously medieval essence of the horror at the heart of The Cipher. The prevailing
moral philosophy of Aquinas and Dante denied any reality to evil. Evil possesses no
positive qualities, according to this worldview—it is merely a negation of the good. That's
why the inhabitants of the lowest reaches of Dante’s hell are frozen into inaction. As
you approach the epitome of evil, its essential passivity turns into its sole defining trait.

Koja has found the perfect way of applying this line of thinking to a contemporary horror
story. If evil, by definition, collapses into a nullity, its most terrifying manifestation must
be some kind of black hole. From this perspective, Koja’s refusal to delineate the inner
workings of her Funhole reflects neither coyness nor a lack of imagination, but rather a
strict adherence to principle.

Nicholas eventually becomes the unwitting instrument of the Funhole. He attracts
the curiosity, and eventually the rapt devotion, of a group of artists and bohemians.
For those at the cutting edge of culture, out to find the next new thing, Nicholas and
his black hole are as avant-garde as it gets. Randy, a tow-truck driver who dabbles in
sculpture, wants to see what the Funhole can do for his art. Malcolm, a cynical visual
artist, also wants to tap into the eerie energy coming from the hole, and increasingly
from Nicholas himself. Other hangers-on and disciples-in-search-of-a-guru join the
growing crowd in the storage room. It seems only a matter of time before police, and
maybe even the military, decide to check out the scene.

The pacing of this book slows down considerably after the first hundred pages, and
normally that would spell doom and gloom for a genre book. But Koja compensates
through the sheer zest and energy of her prose. As the narrative shifts to Nicholas's
internal monologue on the pros and cons of his Funhole-centric life, and his morphing
physiology, Koja turns increasingly to stream-of-consciousness techniques. She relies
heavily on meandering sentences, sentence fragments, eccentric punctuation,
and paragraphs that collapse before reaching closure. She mixes in puns, jokes,
allusions, barbs, philosophical asides, and in general convinces the reader that our
inept hero Nicholas may have failed in his calling as poet, but still has a way with words
as narrator of his personal horror story.

The Cipher stirred up a lot of attention, launching Kathe Koja’s career as a novelist,
and winning a host of awards. The book was honored with the Horror Writers
Association's Bram Stoker Award as best debut novel. It got nominated for a Philip K.
Dick Award and won a Locus Award. It frequently shows up on lists of outstanding
horror fiction. Yet I note, with some astonishment, that it is out-of-print, except in
e-book format. It took me some effort, and expense, to find a beat-up secondhand
paperback copy. Some smart publisher ought to rectify this, and put this stellar work
back in print. It is really too good to fall into some black hole.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: October 30, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood

Week 38
The M agic Toyshop
by Angela Carter

Week 39
The O ther
by Thomas Tryon

Week 40
N ever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Week 41
G host Story
by Peter Straub

Week 42
J ohn Dies at the End
by David Wong

Week 43
T he Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen

Week 44
The C ipher
by Kathe Koja