I don’t read a lot of fiction. I never have a cool or modern answer when someone asks me which fiction writers I enjoy. People don’t like it when you answer that question with “Dostoevsky” (especially not these days), even when you’re not kidding (and I’m not). I find most modern fiction cover designs god-awful, colorfully condescending, stupidly abstract, and impossible to tell apart. But most importantly, I’ve never really managed to define what I liked about fiction, reading whatever was recommended to me and ending up feeling lukewarm about most of it.
I was recently suggested Kathe Koja’s 1991 novel THE CIPHER. As it turns out, this would be a genuinely formative read for me, forever defining what I want out of a novel, out of fiction. Good books haunt you, continue to reveal themselves to you days after you finish them. This book insisted on being written about, followed me around everywhere I went, infected all my thoughts with itself. The prose, playing like a song in my head, impossible to shake. I was taken in, too, by the class commentary consistent throughout the book and its critical view of bourgeois interest in outsider art and alternative spaces.
(spoilers ahead!)
Although The Cipher, a speculative fiction, features a black hole, a terrifying talking mask, and stunning and mind-blowing violence, it is the depiction of our growing appetite and entitlement to and for novelty, the perversion of ‘subversive’ spaces, and the twisted pangs of hunger it produces that make it a true Horror novel to me.
In the book, Nicholas and his lover Nakota find a hole in the storage room of Nichola’s building. They quickly become obsessed with it, re-naming it “The Funhole.” Nakota, specifically, becomes particularly taken with the new addition to their lives, first throwing things into the hole and then bringing in more and more “onlookers,” widening the circle, stretching and testing its limits, boundaries, and Nicholas’s as well. Attracting sculptors and art school posers, entitled and brain dead followers, gawking, trying desperately to get a “piece” of it, of the mystery, for themselves.
Godless culture vultures trying to get a taste of meaning.
Imagine: a bunch of Concordia art students crowded outside your door, waiting for you to Do Something. They’re all wearing trench coats and Doc Martens. Imagine: Ella Emhoff is knocking at your door. She wants to see the thing that’s ruining your life. She’d like to make a piece based on it. Is that cool?
Nicholas, in my opinion, is a stand-in for the everyday sameness of working-class life. Work, eat (beer), sleep, repeat. His creative ambition — poetry, is never within reach. There is always Something Else. There is always fatigue. We can catch him boiling down the drudgery of his life, for anyone who asks, into one simple expression: “gotta eat!” more than once throughout the book. Randy is only slightly luckier, working for a living, but still finding some time for his sculptures. Nakota too, works, though her job as bartender feels like yet another mask, something to put on and take off at will. All of them seeking something outside of the monotony of work, some of them more willing to risk than others.
One could argue Nicholas has two jobs throughout the book: the first, a video store clerk, and the second, newly appointed God for the vapid puddle of people outside the Funhole. Both of which he resents in similar ways. Both of which are killing him.
The spectator for this suffering is logically the bourgeois, the one with the luxury of time. The full-time artist. Enter Malcolm and co. Here, Nakota takes on her second job - as the art dealer, the psychotic gallery owner, the overly ambitious zealot. Seizing on the opportunity and knowing her audience, wrangling her group of wannabe subversives, useless romantics; disciples of the Void (and nothing else), dragging them to the door and promising them a show, maybe, I feel I know some of them. I feel like I’ve been here before, surrounded by the stupid horniness of the thrill-seeker, the edgelord, the art student, the bourgeois.
Honestly, between the funhole and the audience, I choose the hole. Every time!!!!
You can order The Cipher here, and you should.