In February 1991 the first Abyss book, The Cipher by Kathe Koja, hit the racks. A sharply observed slice of early-’90s bohemia, it was about a couple of starving artists in a dying Rust Belt city who find a hole in their storage space. Dubbing it the Funhole (the original title of the book), they discover that anything organic fed into the Funhole comes out disturbingly mutated. So these art scene bottom-feeders use the Funhole to get themselves a gallery show. The Cipher was anything but typical horror. The main action was psychological, and the Funhole is never explained, but readers were
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