The Cipher

Between the stream-of-consciousness narration, the unlikeable characters and the inevitable ending that took forever to arrive, I just didn't like this book.

The plot is this: Nicholas, a video store clerk finds a mysterious hole in an abandoned storage room. He shows it to Nakota, who wants to explore it - lowering items into it, and eventually a camcorder. She becomes obsessed with the resulting video and he with the hole itself.

The unexplained provides the horror here, but not to society or even the town - just to the main characters. Unlike them, I felt no obsession to this book, and finishing it was a chore. This would have been much better as a short story.

Author Kathe Koja is well known for young-adult books. This was her first novel, in the Horror genre. I read it as part of the Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge at Worlds Without End. It was nominated for the 1991 Philip K. Dick award.