They only know that it is called the funhole. Nobody knows what the void is, where it leads, or where it comes from.

It turns out that girls only want one thing and it’s disgusting…Ī closet in Nicholas’ apartment building contains a sucking void. Then it turns out that there’s something else. At first, it seems as though the only thing binding the pair together is Nicholas’ sad-sack thirstiness. On the other side of the boundary is Nakota, a bar-tender who is just a little bit too cool and a little bit too crazy for Nicholas to cope with. On one side of the boundary is Nicholas, a video store clerk of little skill or renown.

Set in a city that could be anywhere but which is most likely New York, The Cipher opens on a couple that are walking the boundary between friends and lovers. Though nowhere near as violently misanthropic as either of those games, Kathe Koja’s The Cipher is definitely closer to that end of the spectrum than it is to stories like Neverwhere.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the nihilistic violence of video games like Manhunt and Condemned. As with all tropes, these stories tended to manifest themselves along a tonal continuum between two extremes: Towards one end of the spectrum you have the relatively benign urban fairy tale of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Back in the 80s and 90s, you would often encounter stories about people living on the margins of society and having that marginality manifest itself as a set of magical powers that helped people to survive a brutal existence set amidst decaying institutions and rotted out buildings. Something you tend not to see very much nowadays are genre stories set amongst the homeless. While The Cipher may not have been enough to keep the roof from crashing in, it was and still is considered to be a stone cold classic.

According to some, the imprint that carried Koja’s debut was ordered to break the rules and look further afield in an attempt to rebuild the genre’s credibility in a bid to prevent the genre from being washed away in the torrent of shit that was the horror paperback explosion of the 1980s. Kathe Koja’s The Cipher was first published around the time when the market for horror novels was beginning to collapse.

Koja the cipher