The Cipher – Old Paper & Cats, Reviews by S. Hargrave

Strange Harvest

This year we got a lot of rain and the temperature was more unpredictable than usual, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that our attempts at growing vegetables all came to not. My lovely spouse loves to use our own herbs and vegetables when she cooks, and while the herbs have been fine, the peppers somehow molded. Even the grocery store has been bereft of its normal abundance of harvest vegetables from the local farms. It’s a bit depressing — even if my lovely spouse reassures me that the famer’s almanac knew this would happen all along.

But one funny thing that has come out of it is watching the squirrels decide to try hot peppers, only to leave them half eaten on the fence and take off at top speed. It usually takes them a few days to return and I am grateful for that amount of time free of fluffy-tailed menaces at my bird feeder.

The Cipher by Kathe Koja is lying on a blue blanket. Beside it, a calico tabby is out of focus and blurred.

A Brief Note on Splatterpunk

Before I discuss the book in specific, I think it’s important to discuss why it’s important and what movement it fits into. Splatterpunk is a subgenre within the horror genre, and it is defined by its used of gore — taking it to its limits and then beyond them. It is primarily male-dominated, and, more often than not in its quest to push the boundaries of violence, it goes too far and strays into territory that makes the reader cringe or want to hurl the book against the wall. I’m talking about racism, I’m talking about extremism, and I’m talking about misogyny, primarily. Women are little more than either sexual objects to be used or malevolent mother figures to be destroyed in a lot of splatterpunk. In the smattering I’ve read there’s also the disturbing trend to twist around the (usually) male character’s violence to make it a woman’s fault.

The Cipher lies on a blue blanket. A calico tabby and several miniature jack-o-lanterns lied beside it.

That’s why I so badly wanted to read a female-written splatterpunk novel. Kathe Koja’s The Cipher is definitely splatterpunk; there is quite a bit of violence here. However, it contains itself to horror and doesn’t stray into ideology or nausea-inducing content meant to shock and offend. The Cipher is an interesting story that uses extreme violence to help the narrative. It doesn’t become the narrative. As a reader, you do not find yourself wondering if Koja somehow wants to become a perpetrator — and that’s something that is unfortunately rare in this genre.

The Cipher by Kathe Koja features a picture of a person with a wide and staring eye holding a hand above their head. The hand and face are dirtied with something liquid, and the photo is grayscale with blue-red toning.

Substance

The plot of The Cipher is rather fiendishly simple. Nicholas lives in a rundown apartment building that has a storage room that no one goes into. What’s in the storage room? A mysterious hole that leads to no-one-knows-where. Is it alive? Is it a gateway? Does it have some kind of sentience? Can it plan for some kind of mass destruction? No one knows. But Nicholas is curious enough to experiment with it and is driven to the edge of reason by it and his lover Nakota’s obsession with it. Eventually things reach a crescendo of violence with consequences that no one can predict or even understand.

A calico tabby bats a miniature pumpkin closer to her. From out of frame, an orange paw reached in to steal a pumpkin of its own.

Now, I know that some would argue that, since it is Nakota that is obsessed with the hole, that this is another example of a woman being blamed for the ensuing disaster. But I think it is more of an example of a female character having agency and driving the plot forward in a way that was rare at the time, especially in this genre. She is not blamed in the narrative and she is not seen as responsible for Nicholas’ actions. Instead, it is an exploration of female characterization at a time where it was often not acceptable to write women as capable of any kind of violence that was not related to a man or to child-bearing.

A calico cat lies on a blanket guarding five miniature pumpkin and an miniature tree with fall foliage. An orange paw is reaching out to steal one of the pumpkins.

Style

Sometimes I found the writing style a bit hard to read and convoluted. There were a few times I had to go back and re-read sentences or paragraphs in order to unwrap them and get at what they were attempting to say. Koja’s writing and her choices of words and phrasing are a lot closer to literary than to the horror genre. This novel definitely asks the reader to make more interpretations on their own and to think about what is happening in the plot. Most genre novels are for pure entertainment and to take the reader on a passive ride. The Cipher is asking the reader to think and to engage with the content and make judgements both about the characters and about what exactly the hole is and what it’s doing to Nicholas.

A calico tabby looks up over a book at an orange cat.

If you want a purely violent read without any meaning, this is not the book for you. Even though it is considered splatterpunk, it is far beyond the book that typically defines the subgenre and that’s a fantastic thing.

An orange cat approaches a calico tabby. The tabby gives her a side-eye over a book.

Halloween Specials

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating this weekend! We will be indulging in our usual tradition of watching a whole bunch of scary movies and our beloved collection of Halloween specials while eating our dinner. Our particular favourites are mostly predictable — It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! and Bugs Bunny’s Howl-o-ween. But the Curious George Halloween movie is particular delightful too. Criterion is featuring some great collections this October and I’m very excited to dive into their curation of Japanese Horror highlights which includes classics like Ringu and Ju-On, but also Cure (one of my favourite films) and Creepy.