The Rats by James Herbert (1974): Down in the Tube. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978): Damned. Dark Dreamers, edited by Stanley Wiater (1990): Fi. Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley (1980): Face. Finishing Touches by Thomas Tessier (1986): One La. I didn’t know it was so sought after as to drive up online prices like that… I’ve encountered a similar hurdle in that I’d like to read “Let’s Go Play at the Adamses’” but I just can’t see payin’ that kind of money for a paperback. I too found this for a few bucks at a used bookstore. It’s like, man, his writing style floated my boat back then, but a few years ago I read a new novel of his and had the bittersweet realization that I’d simply outgrown him.īack to this book, though: I get that they were trying to do something different with this “Abyss” line, and that “The Cipher” was a fitting addition, so I have a bit of grudging respect for its originality. I think it’s just the type of thing that if it were read closer to when it came out, the reader in his/her teens or 20s, it might’ve hit better… I’ve had a similar experience with a writer I really liked when I was in college in the ‘90s: Mark Leyner. I posted a more detailed breakdown on Goodreads, but this novel just really had me struggling to finish it. What if somehow I'm crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest? But the cipher hungers for lives, no matter how derelict, and in a way the ending is foretold. If anything the only real flaw in Koja's book is that it is too relentlessly bleak, too scummy, too hopeless characters bicker and bite, sex is a joyless spasm, Nicholas an alienated, near-unsympathetic loser and Nakota a bitch without the goddess. Until the local art-world poseurs get wind of something strange going on through Nakota, and start haranguing Nicholas to show them what he's doing, what's he got in there, can we see too? They all find out, because the Funhole is calling him from its deeps, not music but the elegant drone of bodily organs. #The cipher kathe koja review movie
Finally they lower down a camcorder (a funny dated bit is how difficult it is for them to actually get a camcorder) and when they watch the recording they see s omething like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, a figure carving itself.Īnd this home movie that Nakota can't stop watching ( "You're watching that like porno"), and Nicholas accidentally gets his hand in there, and now there's a weeping seeping cipher in his hand, and his empty, aimless life is going down, down, down. All come back monstrously deformed and mostly dead. First, a jar of insects goes down into it then a mouse. Nakota, conniving, manipulative, angular, and demanding, constantly pressures Nicholas to fuck with the Funhole, to test their limits. They dub it "the Funhole" (Koja's original title for the novel) but it is anything but fun it is a locus of obsession and transformation. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some - process. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black.
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