The Cipher cover art

The Cipher

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Cipher

By: Kathe Koja
Narrated by: Joshua Saxon
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

About this listen

Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel is finally available as an audiobook.

Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.

THE CIPHER was the winner of the 1991 Bram Stoker Award, and was recently named one of io9.com's Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World by Storm. Long out-of-print and much sought-after, it is finally available as an audiobook, with a new foreword by the author.

©2012 Kathe Koja (P)2020 David N. Wilson Horror Suspense Thriller & Suspense Scary Mind-bending

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Skin cover art
Until the Sun cover art
Intercepts: A Horror Novel cover art
Off Season cover art
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe cover art
My Heart Is a Chainsaw cover art
The Ruins cover art
Darkhouse cover art
Savage Vandal cover art
Dark Space cover art
Decayed Etchings cover art
Elantris (2 of 3) [Dramatized Adaptation] cover art
The Couple Next Door cover art
Infinite cover art
The Missing Boatman cover art
Gideon the Ninth cover art

Critic reviews

"An ethereal rollercoaster ride from start to finish." (The Detroit Free Press)

"Combines intensely poetic language and lavish grotesqueries." (BoingBoing)

"This powerful first novel is as thought-provoking as it is horrifying." (Publishers Weekly)
All stars
Most relevant
Totally worthy of its cult following. Experience and perhaps discover what's down your fun hole? Weird and inventive body horror with a very messy love story at its centre. Here performed very well by Joshua Saxon.

A love story with a gaping hole in the middle.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Nicholas is a directionless twenty-something video store (LOL the 90s) worker living a quasi-hermit life of drinking, smoking and, in the company (and at the instagation) of his on-again off-again never-again always-again lover Nakota, performing weird experiments with the portal to hell in his basement. It is a completely impossible black hole in the floor, which seems to have no end, and which exerts a terrible fascination over anyone who sees it. Nakota's obsession grows as she begins to experiment with introducing live insects, a mouse and a shadily-sourced human hand to the Funhole, as she dubs it, and begins to discern messages and meanings in the unpleasant results. She persuades Nicholas to 'borrow' a camcorder (LOL the 90s again) from his work in an attempt to discover more about whatever lies below, and everything, of course, goes to hell.

This flippant plot summary illustrates how amazing Kathe Koja's work here is. This is a book which by rights should be a splattery romp with monsters, body horror and copious amounts of blood - and on one level, it is, with no judgement if that's what you want from your horror fiction! Koja, however, treats this goofy premise with absolute seriousness, and meticulously illustrates the effect that a fundamentally inexplicable event can have upon people, and most importantly on the relationships between those people. The heart (a word with a great deal of thematic weight here) of this book is love, communication, interaction - and how the absence of these destroys people. I will not go into any details which could spoil plot elements, but Koja sharply sketches and catalogues a series of profoundly dysfunctional relationships that run the gamut from distant and uncaring to manipulative and abusive, and how all of them are made worse by the Funhole. Cruelties are magnified, obsessions are sharpened, betrayals are encouraged.

Nakota is the centre of this, and at the centre of the entire book. She is an extraordinary character, one of the best I can remember in any horror book, and worth the price of admission alone. She has true interiority - her own motivations, unique reactions, her own agency - and all of this is achieved at a remove, with Nicholas being the narrator, and thus attempting to filter our perception of Nakota through his eyes and experiences. She is not having that! Nakota grabs hold of the narrative at various unpredictable points, and relinquishes it equally unpredictably, leaving Nicholas (and us) in a perpetual state of bamboozlement over her motivations. She is brilliant, and in many ways the most profound monster in the entire book.

Koja's prose is hypnotic, with sentences running on and joining into each other, eliding perceptions and events into complex shapes. Joshua Dixon deals with this skillfully, acting as a guide into the madness, but maybe leans slightly too far into Jonathan's passivity as a narrator.

This is a true horror classic that's great to have on audiobook. Highly recommended.


I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

"Love Is A Hole In The Heart"

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
No complaints about the delivery at all. The premise caught my attention and I was excited by the pace of the start of the story - but the bloating and growth of the cast during the middle act became a chore to read. The concepts didn’t grow to match this. The slow descent into insanity or worse for our Nicolas was certainly interesting and the prose was imaginative and brilliant but I can’t help but wish the story was a novella instead. No real discernible satisfaction is earned by continuing through the slog of the second half of this story. The best parts come from the mystery and thrill of the initial discoveries. After that it is really just as pretentious as the artists who flood the pages within.

Great concept - disappointing execution. Literally.

Drawn Out

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
narration was amazing shame the story wasnt as much. worthy of a listen but id stick to clive barker.

not a bad story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
And Koja remains one of my most reread and relistened to authors. Hypnotic prose, incredible startling detail, a style and inventiveness that only my own greed for more makes me wish was less unique to her.

Saxon is one of the best narrators on this platform

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews