Every now and then the spell breaks and you step back and remind yourself that the action here-what’s drawn you completely into its spell-is two people putting things into a hole in the floor. This is the Funhole, described as “not even some thing but some-process.” It’s this lack, this weird entropy, that manifests as a sort of mission drift that seeps from the Funhole into the lives of Nicholas, Nakota, and their circle of fellow artists and “artists.” They put things in the hole and the things come back changed. There’s a kind of ‘90s slacker stasis in their world defined by substances and toxic relationships-but a new unreality emerges right away, in the form of a black, seemingly bottomless hole in the floor of a storage room in Nicholas’s rat-trap apartment building. Right away, we’re inside the head of the narrator, Nicholas, killing time with his partner in bad quasi-romance, Nakota. Kathe Koja’s remarkable novel, The Cipher, sparks with ceaseless, unpredictable energy, like the whole book’s been slathered in Pop Rocks and tossed in the bath. But it’s the off-kilter portrayal of the mundane, where reality comes unstitched in a vaguely sickening way, that really gets under your fingernails and lays its quivering eggs. I’m not one to mess with the staples that make up so much of the horror I love.
That’s not to say that the time-honored elements of horror can’t be used to great and satisfying effect, or reconfigured into something wholly fresh. I’d argue that the kind of fiction that bottles up this feeling and pours it down your throat is more terrifying than any haunted house, vengeful ghost, or Little Kid Who Sees Things. Imagine a distillation of this perception as an elusive high. Consider the moment you wake from a nap into disorientation so pure, the first thing you see when you open your eyes-a lamp, a windowsill-is distorted and unfamiliar.