The Funhole is No Fun

The Cipher by Kathe Koja is one of the weirdest, darkest, most disturbing things I've ever read. It was originally published in 1991 and it reeks of grunge. The original title was "The Funhole," which is what Nicholas and Nakota have discovered in the storage room down the hall. 

Blackhole fun.

After a series of bizarre experiments with the hole-- spearheaded by Nakota-- Nicholas ends up with a second funhole in his hand. And things keep getting weirder. The tone is dark, dank, and ambiguous. I'm not sure if I recommend this book, but it was impossible to put down.

Here are a few quotations to give you the idea of the tone:

These days she must really be gnawing them, and I wondered if the hand had bitten nails too. I’d read that nails kept growing, after death, a little while. “Who bites the nails of the dead?” I said, silly sonorous voice, and was rewarded with one of Nakota’s rarest smiles, a grin of genuine amusement. “I do,” she said, and went on fishing. 

You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things. 

I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. 

And a moment oddly resonant of now . . .

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?