Reviews tagging 'Blood'

The Cipher by Kathe Koja

8 reviews

sarah984's review

challenging dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I've been wanting to read this one for a while and it did not disappoint: nasty characters in nasty situations as everything spins out of control. It got a little repetitive for me near the end and the kindle edition had some annoying OCR errors but overall highly recommended to anyone who likes weird horror.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Toxic relationship, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, and Body horror

Moderate: Self harm, Sexual content, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Confinement, Fire/Fire injury, Gore, Suicidal thoughts, Death, and Emotional abuse

Minor: Eating disorder, Suicide attempt, Car accident, Drug use, Vomit, Ableism, and Excrement

keen's review

dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Toxic relationship, and Sexual content

Moderate: Gore, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, and Confinement

Minor: Excrement and Blood

kurumipanda's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Sexual content, Suicide attempt, Toxic relationship, Gore, Mental illness, Animal death, Body horror, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, and Excrement

Moderate: Grief, Blood, Drug use, and Vomit

Minor: Confinement

judassilver's review

challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Emotional abuse, Gore, Medical content, Murder, Toxic relationship, Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Body horror, Violence, Vomit, Injury/Injury detail, Sexual content, Domestic abuse, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Cursing, Death, and Self harm

Moderate: Suicide attempt, Drug use, Suicidal thoughts, and Mental illness

Minor: Gun violence, Cannibalism, Car accident, Homophobia, and Excrement

stephanieluxton's review

dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

Let's start with what I liked: the premise was great. A mysterious hole appears in a storeroom and anything that enters the void changes. Love it. The possibilities felt endless. Some of the writing felt incredibly poetic and the writing did a great job at making you feel the depressed, grey, bleak atmosphere of the story. This book started out with a pretty fast pace so I thought it would be a wild ride. Then it came to a screeching halt. 
The middle of this book is so boring. I felt like nothing that happened in the entire bulk of the book meant anything. There was extra characters we didn't need. The spooks basically stop entirely til the end. Then it ends and I didn't appreciate the level of ambiguity there was. It felt anticlimactic. This book could have been way shorter.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Animal cruelty, and Alcohol

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Mental illness, Injury/Injury detail, Confinement, Death, Murder, Body horror, Gore, Excrement, Bullying, and Blood

The animal cruelty involves bugs and a mouse being deformed and killed by going through the hole. There's a lot of alcohol. The relationship between the main characters is very toxic. There's a few weird sex scenes. There's some body horror in the form of a hand wound that kind of mutates and spreads. A character gets their ankles broken and is killed. Overall I wouldn't consider this story to be that graphic.

ghast's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Body horror, Injury/Injury detail, Domestic abuse, Sexual content, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Vomit, Alcoholism, and Addiction

errantdreams's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I’ve heard Kathe Koja’s horror novels are excellent, but until now I’d never read one. I absolutely loved The Cipher. Nakota and Nicholas are semi-sorta-sometimes a thing (or at least they sleep together, and Nicholas believes he loves Nakota). But what really draws them together is the mysterious hole to nowhere in the storage room downstairs from Nicholas’s flat. Nakota is determined to experiment with it, using bugs and then a mouse. Something happens to all of them–the bugs mutate strangely before dying, and the mouse… well, we just won’t go there. When Nicholas’s hand goes into the hole, a mysterious sore appears on his palm. They’re able to get some footage of what’s down there using a camcorder on a string, and the results are literally mind-bending. Nakota uses the video tape to draw in more and more people, even when there end up being multiple factions of people fighting over access to the hole. As for Nakota herself, she hopes for a more radical transformation courtesy of whatever’s going on in there.

Wow, the characters. Okay. Phew! Nakota is positively repellant. She uses people. She manipulates people. In fact, I daresay she does not bother to interact with anyone unless she is using and manipulating them. She knows Nicholas loves her and uses that to twist him around her little finger. She’s calculatedly vicious. As for Nicholas, he isn’t Mr. Perfect himself. He loves Nakota in his own weird way, mostly by letting her walk all over him. He spends most of his time drunk. If Nakota had been the point of view character, she would have been too unlikable and obnoxious. Nicholas is perfect as the PoV character, because while he’s no angel, he’s better enough to be engaging despite (or maybe because of) his flaws. Both characters constantly grate against one another. It galls Nakota that Nicholas is transforming when she is not. Nearly all of the characters in here are deeply flawed people.

The flow of the narrative–told from Nicholas’s point of view–is somewhat stream-of-consciousness-like. There’s a lot of exploration of Nicholas’s thoughts and ruminations, and yet I wasn’t bored at all once I got into the story. I never felt like we were retreading too much ground, or that there wasn’t a need for it, or that it slowed things down. Nicholas’s thoughts made things more interesting instead of less.

My only (totally minor) objection is that I wanted just a little bit more at the end. I felt like it ended a bit abruptly. The ending was still very good; I just felt it wasn’t quite as amazing as the rest of the book.

Content note: Sex, animal harm/death, suicidality, and the amount of violence and gore you can expect from pretty much any horror novel. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death

Moderate: Sexual content and Suicidal thoughts

Minor: Blood

jan_coco_day's review against another edition

dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The Cipher opens with Nakota and Nicholas discussing the Funhole: a mysterious hole that has appeared in the storage room at Nicholas's apartment complex. The first line of dialogue in the novel is almost a challenge from Nakota to Nicholas: "You know it. The big black-hole thing, right?" This sets the stage for the most fucked up desire triangle in history: Nicholas wants Nakota. Nakota wants the Funhole. The Funhole wants Nicholas. 

Many stories in the horror genre describe a terror that disrupts the routine lives of normal people, putting a strain on relationships that the characters need to overcome in order to save themselves and each other. But there is nothing to save between Nakota and Nicholas from page one. "Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it," is a *loving* description from Nicholas. Their relationship is about as toxic as you can get. The Funhole doesn't work on normal people like it works on the already depressed, anxious, narcissistic, and suicidal.

 The temptation for any review is to try to describe the Funhole. But it defies description because, while it is *something*, it is not a thing. It is an absence. Does it give anything? Does it take anything? It certainly wants ("want you") but its desires are incomprehensible. Nakota describes the Funhole as "a process." It is neither creative nor destructive, but both at the same time: transformative with no end product. And its medium is people. All the characters are crustpunk artists, but the narrator and focus of the novel is Nicholas, a noncreative entity who considers himself a failed poet--one who either never writes, or destroys what he is written while drunk so that he (or the reader) can read what he has written. Thus begins a downward spiral over what will destroy Nicholas first: the Funhole, or himself? 

Ultimately, the story offers no answers to the questions it arouses--as a novel with a hole at its center should be.</spoiler)

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Confinement, Cursing, Emotional abuse, Gore, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Self harm, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, and Toxic relationship

Moderate: Blood