A camera lowered into the Funhole ought to let Nicholas and Nakota inspect danger from outside it. In Kathe Koja’s The Cipher, the resulting tape instead appears different on successive viewings and holds its audience’s attention. The failure is precise: replay remains possible, but confirmation becomes elusive. Recording has separated the act of looking from the original descent without supplying a stable object to inspect. The tape can therefore renew the demand for another look whenever it fails to resolve the previous one. This reading locates part of the horror in a familiar technical promise, the expectation that recorded evidence will stay available for checking.
The account of the mesmerising videotape in The Cipher places it alongside the novel’s interest in the people attracted to the Funhole. The recording’s failure to stabilise evidence helps explain how looking can sustain that attraction.
01
The camera promises an observation that can be revisited
Nicholas and Nakota encounter the Funhole in a storage room. Their camera offers a particular response to its inaccessibility: send an instrument where a person hesitates to go. At this point the difference between entering and observing seems useful. An image could be brought back, inspected and discussed without making every observer undergo the original exposure.
That promise depends on more than a working camera. A recording normally allows a disagreement about a fleeting sight to become a disagreement about something available again. The viewer can return to the same material. Applied to Koja’s scene, this familiar expectation makes the tape a proposed limit on the encounter: whatever happened below should become an event with an inspectable remainder.
Koja’s own note on the novel stresses its setting before contemporary connective technology and singles out the cheap camera. The modest device matters. This is not an expedition equipped with specialist instruments; a piece of familiar equipment offers Nicholas and Nakota a way to borrow the appearance of investigative distance. The apparatus promises more control than its users possess.
02
Another viewing does not become a second witness
The tape appears differently when replayed. The defect in its evidentiary promise is therefore not merely that the first picture is obscure. An obscure but stable picture could invite patient scrutiny. Here, returning to the recording does not secure the relation between one observation and the next. The thing consulted to check uncertainty becomes another occasion for it.
The distinction separates this reading from a general claim that disturbing images captivate. A viewer can be fascinated by a completely intelligible spectacle. The Funhole tape makes fascination compatible with the hope of resolving what remains unclear. Its failure to answer can supply a reason to continue, so that the attempted investigation and the attachment to it become difficult to distinguish.
Replay is available; corroboration is not assured. In this interpretation, the recording extends the encounter because it keeps reopening the question that justified making it. Nicholas and Nakota have obtained something they can watch again, but availability does not give that object the independence from the Funhole that a useful record would seem to require.
03
The recording cannot explain every form of attachment
The camera enters a relationship already organised around incompatible desires. Meerkat Press’s synopsis contrasts Nakota’s wish to go into the hole with Nicholas’s refusal. The experiment therefore does not begin with neutral observers who become involved only after watching. Their disagreement precedes the promised evidence and shapes what an answer might permit each of them to do.
This limits the media argument. The tape need not create fascination from nothing, and its apparent changes do not establish a particular supernatural mechanism. The claim is about what replay fails to guarantee within the narrative. It is neither a diagnosis of the watchers nor an assertion that moving images ordinarily erase a viewer’s capacity to choose.
Bodily contact also matters independently. Nicholas develops an opening in his palm after contact with the Funhole. That transformation cannot be reduced to a bad viewing experience. Alexander K. Sell’s study, published in Imagining the Impossible in 2024, treats the novel through a wider problem of meaning and nothingness. A reading centred on recording illuminates one route into the horror, without replacing its physical threat.
04
A playable object can still refuse to become an answer
The word recording carries an expectation of survival: the event can end while a trace remains. Koja’s tape troubles the distinction between an encounter and its remainder. If renewed viewing yields fresh uncertainty, the record has not established a finished past to which the viewer can return. The act of checking remains exposed to surprise.
The title supplies a related complication. Koja says her preferred title was The Funhole and that the publisher required The Cipher. Her uncertainty about the replacement prevents treating it as an authorial instruction to solve a code. A reader can still feel its invitation to decipher, just as Nicholas and Nakota can approach the tape as something that ought to become intelligible.
A cipher suggests that patient attention might eventually reach a determinate message. The replay scene offers no such guarantee. The camera has delivered a material result, which makes the attempt look productive, yet that result cannot reliably close the inquiry. Having something to put on the screen is enough to give the next viewing a practical beginning. It supplies no corresponding point at which looking is finished.
Sources
- primaryThe CipherKathe Koja, 1991; Meerkat Press reissue.
- referenceNotes on The CipherKathe Koja, author’s website, 3 June 2010.
- criticismEverything and Nothing: The Horror of Meaning in The CipherAlexander K. Sell, Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media 3.1, 2024. DOI: 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.145604.
Questions about The Cipher
When was The Cipher first published?
Koja identifies it as her first novel, published by Dell Abyss in 1991. Her retrospective note also records her preference for the original title, The Funhole.
Does the Funhole affect living things before the camera experiment?
Yes. The early experiments include insects and a mouse, whose exposure produces bodily changes. The camera belongs to an existing sequence of interventions, not the first discovery that contact can have consequences.
Is Nicholas a professional investigator?
He works in a video shop and is a frustrated poet. That background places familiar recording equipment near him without giving him the authority or resources of a scientific research programme.
Does the Meerkat Press edition include additional commentary?
The publisher lists an afterword by Maryse Meijer. That editorial addition is separate from Nicholas’s narration and should not be mistaken for a character’s explanation of the Funhole.