Seriously if I ever get my novel finished (are we all writing novels?) than I'm going to get Joshua Saxon to do it for me.

Its one of those books that I hear people talking movie rights to and I shudder, as a part of me shuddered when I thought of an audiobook that was until I saw who had done it. I mean, a free audiobook for nothing more than an honest review I'd write anyway? If you hadn't realised already The Cipher is a book I hold in very high regard. So some years later, almost thirty (unbelievably) I saw an audiobook version pop up on Audiobook Boom that seemed to have my name on it. Some books stay with you, they infect you like a virus. I turned on a light then and kept reading and it was dawn before I finally completed it though I'm not sure I ever really closed the book. Originally I read the book in one feverish sitting, not noticing the sun had set and I had obtained my night-eyes until the orange street-lamps outside turned the page to a watered down blood red. The book is not for the faint of heart, neither creative weaklings or the easily repulsed should apply, but if you are in the necessary place in life,you are not easily repelled and have the creative fortitude to travel a route that offers little explanation, then The Cipher is certainly a route to take. There are no explanations, no ready ones at least, but there are many interpretations and each of these interpretations may in itself be a cipher. The Cipher is a cipher, both as a book and as a phenomena within the book. I was twenty years old and fresh from the books of Clive Barker, who had successfully redefined horror a few years before, and I was looking for something new and with the story of Nicholas and Nakota, with the story of the hole and the madness that came with it, I got my wish. The Cipher had a weird step-back cover, a hand cut-out, a face or something like it and an inner cover that spoke of exceptionally dark things. Brite and Kathe Koja names that stayed in my head and followed me around until I went on my weekly excursion through the book shops of my home-town I found nothing from Poppy Brite, which wasn't surprising as she wouldn't have a book out for another year even though Lost Souls had already been touted as a big thing by reviewers but I did find something from Kathe Koja. I was reading an article, I think it may have been in an issue of Fangoria, about a new wave of horror authors and in it I discovered the names Poppy Z. I first became aware of Kathe Koja in the summers months of 1991.

The cipher book kathe koja