The Cipher

The Cipher is the best novel ever written about having no talent and knowing it, and the hole in the floor is almost incidental.

Nicholas is a failed poet with a job he hates, a bad apartment and a drinking habit. Nakota is not his girlfriend in any sense either of them would defend; she is cruel, bored, magnetic, and the most convincing portrait of a destructive person in horror fiction. Their relationship is the engine of the novel and Koja writes it with no sentiment at all: they are not misunderstood, they are not tragic, they are two people who make each other worse and prefer it.

Then there is the Funhole. It is in a storage room on Nicholas's floor. It is round, it is black, it has no measurable bottom, and light does not work in it. They lower a mouse down on a string and it comes back alive and wrong. They lower a video camera and the tape records something that cannot be watched. Nicholas puts his hand in and comes out with a wound in his palm that will not close, that produces fluid, and that he begins to think of as a separate thing.

The prose is the point

Koja writes in a jagged, compressed, present-tense first person full of fragments and run-ons, and it is doing the work of the book: Nicholas's narration degrades as he does, the sentences break down, and the reader is inside a mind losing its grip rather than observing one. It is the most stylistically ambitious horror novel of its decade and it is a genuine barrier for some readers.

The real subject is what happens when a nobody becomes interesting

Nakota evangelises the hole. People arrive. There is a scene crowd, an art crowd, hangers-on in the hallway, somebody filming, somebody with a theory. Nicholas's hand becomes an attraction and then an exhibit, and he is interviewed, handled, photographed and used by people who want proximity to the only remarkable thing he has ever been near — which is a wound he did not earn. Koja's satire of the art world is savage and it is the funniest material in the book.

Where it is hard going

It is relentlessly unpleasant company. Nobody in it is likeable, nothing improves, and the plot in the middle third is largely people standing in a corridor. The style will lose a substantial number of readers in the first thirty pages. And the novel's refusal to explain the Funhole, which is correct, leaves some readers with nothing to hold.

For the same flesh-as-frontier with a theology attached, Books of Blood and Hellraiser; for the same unmeasurable space in a building, House of Leaves; for the same deterioration narrated from inside it, The Croning.

The short answer: by the final act Nicholas has been thoroughly used — his hand exhibited, his apartment invaded, his life conducted by other people — and the Funhole has changed him physically in ways the novel describes without ever explaining. Nakota's obsession has gone past curiosity into a determination to go into the hole herself. Nicholas barricades the storage room to keep her out. She gets through the barricade anyway, and he stops her: he kills her, and the novel is explicit and extremely unpleasant about how. The book ends there, with the question it has been building towards left deliberately open — whether Nicholas killed her to keep the Funhole from having her, or to keep her from having the Funhole. Koja does not adjudicate, and the final pages make both readings available.

What is the Funhole?

A hole in the concrete floor of a storage room, perhaps a metre across, absolutely black, with no bottom that any measurement finds. Light entering it does nothing. Objects lowered into it come back altered in ways that have no pattern: a mouse returns alive and inverted, a camera returns footage that resists being watched, a jar returns full of something. Nicholas eventually concludes it is not a thing at all but an absence — a negativity, a lack — and the novel offers no better account and no origin.

What happens to Nicholas's hand?

He reaches into the Funhole and the wound he comes out with never closes. It weeps, it opens further, it develops something like an interior, and it begins to be treated by the people around him as an object rather than an injury. The novel's most upsetting sustained thread is Nicholas's drift from describing the wound as his to describing it as something he is attached to, and the art-crowd sequences in which it is photographed and displayed are the book's cruellest joke.

Why does Nicholas kill Nakota?

The novel will not say, and the ambiguity is the ending. He has spent the book keeping her away from the Funhole, barricading it, lying about it; when she finally breaks through he stops her permanently. One reading is protective — the hole would have destroyed her and he could not allow it. The other is possessive — her going in would have ended the only thing that is his, and the relationship along with it. Both are consistent with everything we have seen of him, which is the point.

Does anyone go into the Funhole?

Nobody completes it on the page, which is the discipline of the book. Objects go in, parts of people go in, and the whole novel is structured around an aperture that is never crossed. Koja's decision to keep the Funhole a destination nobody reaches is what keeps it unexplained, and the most frequent misremembering of this novel is that Nicholas climbs in at the end. He does not.

What is the Abyss line?

Dell's horror imprint, launched in 1991 with The Cipher as its first title, intended to publish horror that was psychological, transgressive and stylistically adventurous rather than commercial. It ran for about five years and produced work by Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, Melanie Tem and others, and The Cipher won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel. The line is the reason this book exists and the reason it was out of print for two decades afterwards.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 085 is near the ceiling — only 12 works score higher. The Funhole has no rules, the narrator is degrading, and the prose itself stops being reliable.

Viscera 072 is high — 86 works score lower. An open hand wound described across the whole novel, altered animals, bodily fluid as a recurring image, self-injury, and a killing at the end.

Tone 010 is bleak — 17 works score lower. Nobody improves, nothing is learned, the one relationship in the book ends in a murder, and the final pages offer no relief of any kind.

Pace 028 is slow — 39 works are slower. Much of the middle is people in a hallway and a narrator who cannot organise his own account.

Era bias 040 is just under the midpoint. Camcorders, answering machines, photocopied zines and a 1991 art scene — technologically specific and now historical.

The threat at 040 is on the supernatural side — 54 works score lower, although the novel is careful that every cruelty in it is committed by a person.

On shocks: almost none. The book is a deterioration, not a sequence of events.