Into the Funhole: Kathe Koja's The Cipher

Abstract

This essay analyzes the Detroit writer Kathe Koja's 1991 novel The Cipher to demonstrate how her systematic omission of the conventional themes and formal elements of weird fiction results in an intensified interrogation of the genre's characteristic affects and their physical embodiments. Such affects are all that remain of the individual human subject under neoliberalism, and the ceaseless, directionless transformations wrought upon Koja's characters by their experimentation with the incomprehensible “Funhole” named in the book's title result in no integration of identity or restoration of agency, no redemptive insight, no transcendence of any kind.