It left me feeling awful but I needed more. I wasnвЂ™t living their lives but I was physically living their emotions. As their fear and anxiety grew, my own chest tightened. As the characters grew weaker, so too did I. Page after page my muscles felt like they were fighting gravity just a little more. It was the same feeling you get when you know a situation is about to get out of hand. As the story unfolded I felt myself starting to change from within. This was their world and these were their lives before they ever discovered the вЂњfunhole.вЂќ Afterward, things begin to turn downright gangrenous. Some wave a torch at the dampness to ward it off, others scrape off the mold only when it gets too unbearable. Each character fights the rot in their own way and at their own level of intensity. Giving in to the rot means being swallowed and digested by it. But these characters are alive and like all living things, the rot must be dealt with. Its main characters rot inside of their rotting apartment built in a rotting world. Somehow, this nothing can do a whole lot of something and that something isnвЂ™t good. Those who stare into its nothingness grow to need more of it. They call it вЂњthe funholeвЂќ and as anyone would be wont to do, they start putting things inside. The basic premise is this: two friends/lovers/enemies Nicholas and Nakota, find an other-worldly dark void in the broom closet of NicholasвЂ™ apartment building. I have always been fascinated by how much beauty can be found in beastly art if only you look hard enough andВ The CipherВ is a stomach turning stunner. IвЂ™m going to work very hard not to spoil this incredible work of body horror because I think everyone who can stomach it should read it. Those writers who, through their stories, teach us whatвЂ™s possible for our own craft. I had to know how her dark, twisted story had twisted me right along with those living within its pages. What just happened? How on earth did they do that? Can I do it too? When I first read The CipherВ by Kathe Koja, I was awed at how deeply the story affected me. As a reader this experience is exhilarating but as a writer itвЂ™s also a challenge. They force you to fly high with a characterвЂ™s laughter or to grip their hand as anxiety takes you both. These books donвЂ™t just tell you how it feels to live the characterвЂ™s life, they donвЂ™t just show you and rely on your empathy, they make you feel it for yourself. Books that spread throughout your systems, sometimes as an energy that lifts and warms and sometimes as a shadow that squeezes and aches, and drinks from your soul. Books that burrow deeper with each passing sentence.

Then there are the books that crawl inside of you. Dick Award.ДЄnd the glorious cover art by Keith Rosson, author of Smoke CityВ and The Mercy of the Tide.Good books let us immerse ourselves in their worlds and great books pull us in. It is the winner of the Bram Stoker Award, Locus Award, and a finalist for the Philip K. Kathe KojaвЂ™s classic novel of fear, obsession, creation, and destruction, The Cipher, which reopens the door on the Funhole with this brand new and long-awaited print edition. For a long time available only as an eBook, Meerkat Press and Ink Heist are pleased to announce that the Funhole is coming back in all its dark glory and we have a fucking gorgeous cover to share with you today.

It would be safe to say that Kathe Koja is one of the best authors working in horror or any other speculative genre right now, and it would be just as safe a bet that her previously out of print novel, The Cipher, is the most sought after volume in her lexicon of work.

The cipher kathe koja cover art