The Cipher

"Like Barker, there is something about Koja that is simultaneously destructive and creative. She captures the curiosity behind fear. The plot of The Cipher is very simple. A man discovers a small black hole in one of the rooms of the building where he lives. He starts noticing that if you put things through it they return somewhat changed, that something about their genetic makeup alters. Some of them seem to come back with these marks that look like runes—hence ‘the cipher’ of the title. Eventually, by accident, one of the man’s hands ends up in the hole. This moment goes on to fundamentally change everything about him and his experience of the world. Not much is spelled out for the reader, and yet the novel is so gripping. You feel a mixture of curiosity and fear as you go through it. What could this hole be? What is it going to do to this person? By the time you get to the end, you’re thinking: ‘what am I even reading anymore?’ You’re right. That speaks to my perception of fear more than anything else. I’m terrified by things that shake up who and what we think we are, our certainty. One of the things that come out of Kathe Koja’s novels is the role of art in helping us make sense of the chaos of the world and the unruliness of our bodies—we are creatures in constant flux, in a planet in perpetual change. Stability and order are fantasies we tell ourselves for comfort, and literature and art more generally are creative tools that help us catalyse what we think we understand. Many of Koja’s characters are artists who are not particularly successful: they may be able to capture something of the strangeness of life, but ultimately, it’s either too much for others or not majoritarian. I think this encapsulates the power of horror in general—how it can shatter our preconceptions, force us to evaluate how we know what we know—but also its limitations, why it won’t appeal to everyone. Many people prefer happy stories that will give them a sense of affirmation, of security. I find horror the most human, powerful and honest of genres precisely because it doesn’t. I think so. Is it the void of existence? The void of meaning? The silences in their relationship? And yet it is a productive void. It is a void that returns things. It doesn’t just devour them. Objects, animals, body parts—they all come back fundamentally changed in ways that can be no longer rationalised. I suppose we’re back in Lovecraft territory. We have stuff that’s unintelligible, beyond our cognitive powers, and that fascinates me. We’re limited in our perception of the world by the subjective nature of the tools we have at our disposal—our mind, our eyes, our hands. Any attempt at exploration cannot help but be solipsistic. One of the things that horrify me the most are black holes: we still don’t truly understand them, in the same way that we don’t truly understand the cosmos. Neither is ‘evil’, simply currently beyond our comprehension. I’m glad you mention form. Koja will sometimes mix words together and the rhythm of her sentences is syncopated. They don’t all read like fully formed thoughts. They can be more like fragments or impressions. You can’t skim-read her books, even though her writing is very much a stream of consciousness . You really have to stop and think about referents, meaning and so on. “I find horror the most human, powerful and honest of genres” It’s almost modernist in that respect. Koja seems interested in depicting thought—and the language we use to literalise it—as inherently disorientating. There’s nothing more fearful than the mind; it’s where all our fears collect. When you’re experiencing fear through the psychology of someone whose grasp on the world is already compromised by their circumstances, that makes it even more powerful. The scariest of literary horrors are, in my view, not just conceptual, but also linguistic. They activate something personal. And that’s why horror is both shareable and private."