Everything and Nothing: The Horror of Meaning in The Cipher

Kathe Koja’s strange horror novel The Cipher (1991) is a peculiar genre fiction that immediately attracts the attention of both horror connoisseurs and philosophers alike. It is at once a visceral, psychological horror and a theoretically intriguing dilemma. It follows the fascinating and horrific events that transpire after a disc of pure nothingness opens up in the protagonist’s home, consuming the lives of the characters just as it does the plot. This non-object pushes readers to discern its peculiar ontology but yields, as one would expect, nothing. This essay reads The Cipher through Martin Heidegger’s equally unorthodox version of the nothing (das Nichts), demonstrating how Heideggerian metaphysical thought can help to illuminate the novel’s strange nothingness, and how Koja’s novel can help us to see the horror inherent in Heidegger’s philosophy. It suggests that horror may be found not in the nihilistic lack of meaning but in our “imprisonment” in meaning.