The Cipher by Kathe Koja
Koja has a certain quality that makes her both destructive and inventive. She captures the intrigue concealed by dread. The Cipher’s story is quite straightforward. In one of the apartments where he resides, a man finds a tiny black hole. He begins to notice that when objects are placed through it, something about their genetic make-up changes and they come out substantially altered. The title “the Cipher” refers to the fact that some of them seem to return with these marks that resemble runes. One of the man’s hands eventually finds itself accidentally in the hole. Everything about him and his perspective of the world changes fundamentally as a result of this moment.
The Cipher by Kathe Koja
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I’ve heard great things about Kathe Koja’s scary books. I adored The Cipher utterly. Nakota and Nicholas have a sporadic relationship (or at least they sleep together, and Nicholas believes he loves Nakota). The strange tunnel to nowhere in the storage room below Nicholas’ apartment is what actually connects them, though. Nakota is keen to test it out, first with a mouse and then with bugs. The mouse dies and the bugs undergo odd mutations before something occurs to them all. An enigmatic sore emerges on Nicholas’ palm when his hand is inserted into the gap. Using a camcorder on a string, they are able to get some footage of what is below, and the results are really mind-blowing.
Even though there are various factions of individuals vying for entrance to the hole, Nakota continues to pull people in by playing the video recording. As for Nakota, she hopes that whatever is happening inside will cause a more profound transformation. The individual Nakota is downright repulsive. She employs them. She deceives others. She may not even try to talk to people unless she wants to use and control them, I venture. She takes advantage of Nicholas’s love for her to control him completely. She is viciously calculated. Nicholas isn’t Mr Perfect in his own right. He shows Nakota his love in a peculiar way, usually by letting her abuse him. He binges most of the time.
Nakota would have been too annoying and unlikeable if she had been the point of view character. Nicholas is the ideal POV character because, although not being an angel, he is still good enough to have the reader care for him despite (or perhaps because of) his imperfections. Both of the characters irritate one another all the time. The fact that Nicholas is changing while she is not infuriating Nakota. Almost all of the characters in this story have serious flaws. The narrative, which is delivered from Nicholas’s perspective, has a stream-of-consciousness quality to it. The author spends a lot of time exploring Nicholas’s ideas and musings. Instead of making things less intriguing, Nicholas’s ideas increased them.
