Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall. "Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Something we haven't tried before," Nakota says. But she and Nicholas aren't in control, not from the first moment, so they free fall as the Funhole leads to obsession, darkness, and transformation.
Kathe Koja's classic horror novel was the winner of the 1991 Bram Stoker Award, and was recently named one of io9.com's Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm. Long out-of-print and much sought-after, THE CIPHER is finally available as an ebook, with a new foreword by the author.
"An ethereal rollercoaster ride from start to finish." - The Detroit Free Press
"Combines intensely poetic language and lavish grotesqueries." - BoingBoing
"Unforgettable ... [THE CIPHER] takes you into the lives of the dark dreamers that crawl on the underbelly of art and culture. Seldom has language been so visceral and so right." - Locus
"Kathe Koja is a poet ... [T]he kind that prefers to read in seedy bars instead of universities, but a poet." - The New York Review of Science Fiction
"This powerful first novel is as thought-provoking as it is horrifying." - Publishers Weekly
"Not so much about the vast and wonderful strangeness of the universe as it is about the horrific and glorious potential of the human spirit." - Short Form
"A tour de force of style, horror, strong emotions, fear and obsession" - Writer's Digest
"Tough, savage, uncompromising ... It's a hell of read." - The Geis Letter
"[THE CIPHER] is a book that makes you sit up, pay attention, and jettison your moldy preconceptions about the genre ... Utterly original ... [An} imaginative debut." - Fangoria
