Kathe Koja

In a disused storage room in a crappy apartment building there is... a hole. A nothingness. A deep, dark, strange black process that changes anything that gets too near it, in disturbing and illogical ways. Nicholas, a pathetic failed poet who shares a building with it, can feel it wanting him. Nakota, his cruel, nihilistic sort-of-ex in turn wants it, desperately. Whatever it is. Whatever it does.

I wasn't sure about the writing style of this for the first few pages: a bit disjointed and show more odd, full of colons and spliced-together sentences. But the author does know what she's doing with it, and I quickly came to feel that it worked very well for the subject matter, to be really pulled in by it, and to find myself intrigued, creeped out, and appreciative.

I do think the novel loses a bit of momentum in the middle, and despite being not much over two hundred pages long, it might perhaps have done just as well if it were a little bit shorter. So, it didn't feel quite as thoroughly compelling and intense as it seemed towards the beginning, when I was simultaneously desperate to read more and dreading what I'd find when I did. But it is, still, a really solid, interesting, unsettling, and gratifyingly strange novel, and one that, like much of the best horror, touches on a lot of psychological themes in complex and sometimes subtle ways. And the end, for all its deliberately unanswered questions, left me feeling satisfied, or at least like it had gotten under my skin in the right kind of way.

The 2020 edition I have also comes with a short and insightful afterword by Maryse Meijer, which I found very much worth reading. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive."

When a strange hole materializes in a storage room, would-be poet Nicholas and his feral lover Nakota allow their curiosity to lead them into the depths of terror. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says, "We're not." But no one is in control, and their experiments lead to obsession, violence, show more and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republished thirty years on, this debut horror novel far exceeds my memory of it; when it came out, I wasn't interested in its eldritch overtones and dismissed its literary charms far too readily for that reason. Still not that interested in cosmic horror, as horror anyway, since the crap people do to each other every day scares me a lot more than some Evil Force somehow making people do awful stuff or, sillier still, does awful stuff to them despite being disembodied...possession and so forth come under the heading of mental illness untreated or undiagnosed in my materialist worldview.

But honestly, so what. This is a story, fiction with all that implies. Author Koja's been at this gig for decades now, and it's clear she started strong with this debut. Like all well-made fiction, this novel tells us truths about ourselves and our world. Self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, all come into the story and are treated with due respect. This being thirty years ago, maybe not the way we'd talk about them now, but they aren't presented as reasons to become a victim.

The power dynamics of this book are very intricate. Upper hands slip. Control falters. People don't behave in reasonable ways, ever! The story unspools at a fairly brisk clip and rewards your attention to its details. Since this is a body horror novel, you know violent changes will be wrought on humans. It's part of our culture to revel in this strange obsession with involuntary body modification and/or death. Not always to my personal taste. This story's main appeal isn't its physical violence but its quieter, less obtrusive dealings with the power within a relationship, how it's used, what it does to the parties involved...and, on that level, this story *rocks*! Can't recommend it unreservedly, see the CWs, but recommend it I do to my fellow #Deathtober fans. show less

Nicholas and his sometime-girlfriend Nakota discover a hole to nowhere in the floor of the storage room in Nicholas's apartment building and become irresistibly drawn to it, with bizarre results.

The hole--which Nakota christens the Funhole--is never explained. It has the attraction of the unknown, of something completely outside the realm of mundane existence, which is why Nakota is fascinated by it, despite its obvious dangers. Nicholas's fascination stems at first from his obsession with show more Nakota, but then he too is ensnared by the Funhole. He becomes literally infected by it and thus belongs to it and is the owner of it in some weird way, which enrages Nakota. Things do not end well.

This is a very strange book, written in almost a stream-of-consciousness fashion. Koja doesn't bother to explain what's happening; as readers, we have to accept that it is happening or go find another book. That can be somewhat frustrating, but the writing is good, and Koja brings this claustrophobic world, with its smells and oozing liquids and wounds, to life. She rubs your face in it, in fact. My main complaint is that I don't think this is quite a novel. It goes on a bit too long, and I think it would have been more effective if it were shorter. show less

What a ride, what a ride…

Hard to tell, what this is exactly – body horror, cosmic horror, gore, psychological drama, all of this, and then some. Koja’s flowing prose, a stream-of-consciousness narrative, grittily humorous and beautiful in its descripions of squalidness and fear had me drawn in from the first.

Nakota, the narrator’s sort-of girlfriend (when and as it suits her), as heartless, selfish and bullying a bitch (think Lucy from the “Peanuts” show) as you’ll hope to show more never meet, is the first to discover the black hole in the closet, dubbing it the “funhole”. Her ideas of fun are certainly more than twisted, I for one had a hard time fathoming what exactly is supposed to be so funny about a black hole of nothingness that kills, twists and horribly mutilates whatever gets too close. It’s Nicholas (the Linus to Nakota’s Lucy) of all people, who seems to be triggering these events by his nihilistic attitude. As we watch him drifting along and Nakota recruiting more and more devotees to her newly-founded cult, we may be sure that it won’t end well.

Or is any of this even happening? After all, right from the start the narrator is evincing all the symptoms of a clinical depression and may well be sliding into full-on psychosis as the story devolves.

A read that will stay with my, hard as I may try to forget it. show less