In Bad Brains the hero suffers a blow to the head that leaves him with frontal lobe seizures and visions of a malevolent mass of the color silver. The Cipher concerns what must be a scientific phenomenon that none of the wastrel art students who are dragged into the tale see any need to investigate beyond the fact that it is way cool and weird. Koja needs very little of the supernatural for her horror tales. This is horror that infests a social setting where young people are making bad decisions that push their curiosity for all things dark and weird toward grotesque and tragic consequences. The Cipher, Bad Brains (1992), and Skin (1993) are overripe with grungy, sex-drenched prose, but they work. But the switch could do her good, possibly trimming some of the lugubrious fat from the prose of these earlier works. I haven’t read the YA novels, but given the content of the three horror novels I have read, she had to make a serious turn to produce YA material. This is the set up for Kathe Koja’s debut novel The Cipher, one of the three horror novels she wrote in the early 1990’s before turning to YA fiction. Then all sorts of horrible and unfortunate things could happen, one of the worst being the appearance of a similar hole in the palm of my hand. On the other hand, if I was either of the characters from Kathe Koja‘s The Cipher (1991), no, I would keep the discovery as the special plaything for myself and my really pretty awful girlfriend.

If I found a hole into another dimension in the utility closet of my dingy apartment building, I like to think I would contact either MIT or the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Be sure to visit his blog for more genre goodness. In this series Dee explores the darker side of genre fiction and it’s practitioners. Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his extensive Philip K. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.

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