The Cipher

Overview

From acclaimed author Kathe Koja comes the highly anticipated paperback reissue of her award-winning horror classic 

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Awards, finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and named one of io9.com's "Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm." With a new afterword by Maryse Meijer, author of Heartbreaker and Rag. "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." When a strange hole materializes in a storage room, would-be poet Nicholas and his feral lover Nakota allow their curiosity to lead them into the depths of terror. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says, "We're not." But no one is in control, and their experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.

Reviews

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel "This powerful first novel is as thought-provoking as it is powerful." —Publishers Weekly "A tour de force of style, horror, strong emotion, fear and obsession." —Writer's Digest "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, the phrases sometimes pinpricks looking for a witch's mark and sometimes knife thrusts to the heart." —Scott Winnett, Locus "Tough, savage, uncompromising … It's a hell of a read." —The Geis Letter "Kathe Koja has a distinctive and therefore particularly memorable talent … The sense of wonder you get from a Koja story is 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 "[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

Author Biography

Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists.