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A review by mamimitanaka
The Cipher by Kathe Koja
3.0
This was a tantalizingly grotesque novel that I often felt conflicted on while reading, but at the same time these weren't necessarily flaws with the book itself. Koja's prose is good but often feels a bit convoluted and difficult to follow in a way that wasn't an enjoyable confusion, but the narrative itself supports the writing style; Nicholas is a failed twenty-something poet, so it makes perfect sense his narration would be chock full of counterintuitive sentences and phraseology. And there were times when I felt the book really dragged, but once again isn't that the life of a deadbeat alcoholic underachiever? The meandering also helps serve the nauseating claustrophobia of Nicholas' daily life; the setting very rarely deviates from his flat or the storage room, stuck in one place with nowhere to go and nowhere to escape from a suffocatingly toxic relationship. The characters' lives may deviate slightly at points, but the soot-blackened core of the novel remains crushingly unchanging throughout. And Nicholas himself is a well-drawn narrator, his own self-pity and continued debasement of everything that matters in his life making him as equal parts despicable as genuinely sympathetic, and likewise Nakota is one of the most realistically and chillingly portrayed depictions of an emotional abuser I've ever seen in genre fiction. And while this is an American novel, I would be surprised if Koja didn't take inspiration from Eastern horror here, particularly cinema; it has the same grimy, transgressive heart of a lot of J-horror films, with its fixations on body horror, gore, analog-inspired horror [with video tapes playing a big role here], and its combination of all of these to inform an inward-looking psychological narrative. And while this isn't a laugh riot I was surprised by how funny the book is at points too, with Nicholas' self-eviscerating inner monologue sometimes translating into a bitter wit reflecting his own poetic disposition. Not up there with my favorite horror novels, but it does a lot of things right.
"But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn't care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one's in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she'd thought about that, too, and just didn't give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass all at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it feel?"
"But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn't care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one's in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she'd thought about that, too, and just didn't give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass all at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it feel?"