It’s a marvel of bleak economy: Nicholas, going nowhere in his video-store-clerk job, discovers a foot-wide black vortex in an old storage room of his apartment building.

The Cipher is a good time.Winner of both a Bram Stoker Award and a Locus Award in 1991, Koja’s debut has yet to lose one iota of impact. Cringy sex-stuff, gross-outs, and jaw-dropping moments. There are some memorable, classic horror scenes that will stay with me forever. These are the perfect people to get caught up with a horrible Funhole. The dynamic between Nakota and Nicholas and their friend group reminded me of the movie Reality Bites - it really has that whole ’90s twenty/thirtysomething vibe - where everything is sarcastic or done ironically and everyone seems too self-absorbed and unsure of themselves to function. That being said, Koja’s imagination and particular brand of body horror is on another level. Almost like a stream of consciousness but too intermittent to get used to it. Little stumbles like that pulled me out of the story on a few occasions. Sometimes I thought I was reading exposition and then realized it was the inner dialog of Nicholas.

The narrative in The Cipher head-hops a bit from one character to another. I find Koja’s style a bit jarring and disorienting at times. Some of the stories, like “Baby,” really worked for me, and some of them didn’t. I’ve read a few short stories in her collection Velocities, also released by Meerkat Press this year. This is not my first time reading Koja’s work. The mystery of their relationship was as fascinating to me as the affectionately named “Funhole.” Obsession, as we all know, does not end well, and horrible things do happen mostly because Nakota is self-destructive, impulsive, and a bit of an emotional “black hole” herself. They happen upon a strange, black hole in Nicholas’s apartment building and become obsessed with experimenting with it. In Kathe Koja’s The Cipher, Nicholas and Nakota are pretty loathsome people. I don’t need to like people in order to emotionally invest in their stories - sometimes, hating them is just as fun as loving them. I think protagonists should be as varied as the people we encounter in real life. There’s kind of this unofficial debate among readers concerning those who enjoy unlikable characters and those who need protagonists to be tolerable in order to invest in their story. Reviewed by Sadie “Mother Horror” Hartmann

The cipher koja