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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