,. , ,. . . . . . . `| /| / ,-. ,' ,-. ,-. |-. ,-. ,-. ,-. |- ,-. |-. ,-. . , ,-. ,-. |-. ,-. ,-| |- . ,-,-. ,-. | / | / |-' | |-' | | |-' | |-' | | | | | ,-| | / |-' ,-| | | ,-| | | | | | | | |-' ,. `' `' `-' ' `-' ' ' `-' ' `-' `' `-' ' ' `-^ `' `-' `-^ `-' `-^ `-' `' ' ' ' ' `-' `' .- .---. . . . -. | \___ . . ,-. |- |-. ,-. ,-. . ,_, ,-. ,-. ,-. | ,-. . . . ,-. ,-. | | \ | | | | | | | |-' `-. | / |-' | | | | ,-| | | | | | | | | | `---' `-| ' ' `' ' ' `-' `-' ' '"' `-' ' |-' `' `-^ `-| ' ' ' `-| | `- /| | /| ,| -' `-' ' `-' `' + DRACULA PARISH NEWSLETTER 003: 04-05-2026 + I've neglected this blog horribly, as I knew I inevitably would. However, this is at least mostly on account of being busy with some actual EXCITING NEW PROJECTS that I'll be able to speak to more in due course. One I can mention now, however, which is that at the time of writing I'm going to be guesting on the podcast Out To Get You in a couple of days to talk about Possession (1981), so subscribe now to the get the updates! I've also been working on another _film-related thing_, which I can't talk about yet, but believe me is gonna be rad! Anyway, I would usually (viz. that one time) do a film and a music section, too, but I'm very tired and legitimately have a lot to do this week. So enjoy this, I guess. + WRITING + THE CIPHER (Kathe Koja, 1991): Koja is an author I'd not come across before picking up the recent Dead Ink re-issue of her 1991 debut a couple of days ago, a fact I find somewhat incredible having now finished the book and immediately ordered a copy of Strange Angels (selected only for the fact that it's the only one of her works with an individual wikipedia page - idk what's up with that). It's an impressively dark read. This is for a number of reasons, the most immediate one of which is the way it presents the central horror element. That is, the profoundly upsettingly named "Fun Hole": an opening in the floor in the utility basement of the apartment complex in which the protagonist - failed poet and early career alcoholic Nicholas - wiles away his miserable existence between shifts at a thinly-disguised Blockbuster Video analogue. Its conceptualisation, the strangely human inhumanity of the thing - the fact that despite being a manifestation of ineffable cosmic darkness, it nevertheless deports itself with a sense of humour - is something that screams Ligotti straight away. Curiously, however, this is speaking more to the Ligotti of The Red Tower and My Work is Not Yet Done (1996 and 2002, respectively), than the contemporary Ligotti of Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1992). If anything, though, what the depiction of The Fun Hole reminded me of the most is the phenomena of Area X in Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach series(2014-2024). Not only because it presents a the *horrible thing* as a dynamic process that alternates depending on its inputs, but because the nature of these manifestations is inherently subjective. That is, the idea that whatever comes out of it (or at least the words we find to describe it) is framed in terms of an aberration of human cognition rather than just an unambiguously abject *thing*. It is thus appropriate - and I think that this is one of Koja's smartest moves - that we don't really get any kind of discovery narrative for the hole itself. Rather than a creeping manifestation or Lovecraftian encounter with the inexplicaple, that in another book might seem the obvious choice, the novel opens with Nicholas and his awful girlfriend Nakota making (deservedly) crass jokes about the hole, its supernatural characteristics already more or less accepted fact. I won't elaborate too much further (just fucking read it) save to say that what follows over its subsequent 240-something pages is both wholly apt and at no point predictable. In demonstrating how the Fun Hole becomes both the product of, and catalyst to, everything that is fucked up in the life and psychopathically toxic relationship of Nicholas and Nakota, Koja delivers as close to a vision of hell as I've ever come across in modern literature. And it is a distinctly 90s hell at that. A real fuckin' NIN-Alice_In_Chains-Marylin Manson music video/David Lynch Playstation ad/late night MTV2 experimental shorts vision of a Dante/Virgl holiday ensemble. And to that point, actually, another particularly strong component of the book is its depiction of a self-ascribed degenerate local art scene. This is something I flag up because it’s such a mainstay of horror fiction and film, especially from the period (cf.Teattro Grottesco, Alan Moore's The Courtyard, and pretty much any Cronenberg movie pre-2000), but I found that Koja handled it particularly well where numerous others have failed, creating an image of an underworld possessing a genuine aura of danger yet all the while skewering the shallow narcissism of practically everyone involved. One [ultimately minor] critique is that it doesn't necessarily stick the landing - or at least I found it something of an anticlimax. As the novel enters its final phases, the action shrinks down to the events happening in and around a single room in which Nicholas suffers through the final phases of his ever more depraved existence. The two things that these scenes brought to mind for me the most were Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon (adapted magnificently as The Devils by Ken Russell in 1971) and Ballard's High Rise (whose adaptation by Ben Wheatley in 2015 kind of left me cold, but I might revisit since I do love his other work), in the way that all three seem to depict a self-contained psychosexual apocalypse that can really only end in one of two ways: implosion or reconfiguration of the world as such - both of which could have been interesting, and neither of which happens at the end of The Cipher. Although one of the final lines is objectively one of the funnniest of the whole book. Anyway, fantastic way to fuck up a bank holiday weekend! Also, bonus points for evil girl who is also a bartender representation.