We flick from thing to thing, and gradually a picture of our surroundings emerges. We perceive vision as continuous, but it’s actually made up of thousands of micro-adjustments called “sacchades”. Koja, more than any author I’ve read, writes the way people see. The insects jumbled, up and down, fighting the barrier they couldn’t see, then, “Look,” her sharp whisper but I was looking already, staring, watching as the bugs, one by one, began to drop, dying, to the floor of the jar, to whir in minute contortions, to, oh Jesus, to change: an extra pair of wings, a spare head, two spare heads, colors beyond the real, Nakota was breathing like a steam engine, I heard that hoarseness in my ear, smelled her hot stale-cigarette breath, saw a roach grow legs like a spider’s, saw a dragonfly split down the middle and turn into something else that was no kind of insect at all. Her scent was higher, her breath never slowed she tried to smoke but I told her no, not in that airless firetrap, firm whisper, as firm as I ever got with her anyway, and she gave in. We waited quite a while, there in the dark, my back against the locked door, Nakota for once at my side. Koja’s sentences are frag grenades, in both senses. Her patented “kill all verbs” style shatters sentences into oblique, slanted observations, which collectively pile up into scenes, action, etc. Why would this be true? What’s special about him?
Early on, Nakota makes the observation that the Funhole (as they call it) only becomes active when Nicholas is around it. The “holes” in these books are never actually holes, they’re a metaphor for some writerly stalking horse (the unexplainable, death, and so on). Things transform when they pass through it. A fracture appears in reality one that cannot be understood, only experienced. The Cipher belongs to the micro-genre of “hole fiction”, which includes Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 and Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Amigara Fault and others I can’t recall. A dead mouse turns into a Jurassic horrorshow with claws twice the length of its feet. Bugs grotesquely mutate into chitinous aberrations.
They begin dropping things into the hole on a string. Failed poet Nicholas (and his codependent girlfriend Nakota) find a black hole in storage cupboard.
…and then went out of print for thirty years. Kathe Koja’s first novel The Cipher was published in 1991, won the Locus and the Bram Stoker, was critically acclaimed as a major work of the genre… Horror novels have a shelf life of forever or five years, whichever comes first.
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