The Cipher

The Cipher

1991 • 356 pages

Ratings24

Average rating3.4

15

Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand - weeping not blood, but a plasma of tears...

It began with Nakota and her crooked grin. She had to see the dark hole in the storage room down the hall. She had to make love to Nicholas beside it, and stare into its secretive, promising depths. Then Nakota began her experiments: First, she put an insect into the hole. Then a mouse...

Now from down the hall, the black hole calls out to Nicholas every day and every night. And he will go to it. Because it has already seared his flesh, infected his soul, and started him on a journey of obsession - through its soothing, blank darkness into the blinding core of terror...


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Popular Reviews

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She'll never love you
being useful is enough
but won't fill the hole.

October 17, 2021

Body horror at its best

Are we just the sum of our physicality? Are we more? And is that physical barrier between what is me and the rest of the world breachable? Should it be?

October 2, 2016

Definitely a good read. But it felt guilty of a lot of the pretentiousness it tried to occasionally put down. Equal parts creepy, horrifying, and funny, but a little too existential for my tastes. A cosmic, body horror that felt a little like a therapy session.

July 27, 2023