Book Review: The Silver Cipher

Title: The Silver Cipher

Author: J. Jasper North

Date: 2023

Publisher: Twin Quill

Quote: "The woods feel weird today."

Somewhere in one of the parts of North America that have hills and a river, some students are digging up something that they keep thinking they may regret having dug up.

--SPOILER ALERT-- --If you want to read through a whole novel-length build-up of suspense, stop reading this review now--

This straightforward story could have been made more enlightening or entertaining, but instead North chose to go for "weird." Young people dig up bits of town history that someone wanted to leave buried. They follow old markings and directions that lead them to something that should have stayed hidden. Who were these mysterious people and what were these mysterious things? Turns out, the peaceful little town may be on top of valuable mineral reserves, too deep to be dug up without spoiling the town. What should have stayed hidden was greed. 

For me, the attempt to tell a simple story about a town that recovered from mining fever would be more successful without the attempt to bring it into the horror genre. Horror fiction is about human weaknesses but it's never, in the tradition of the genre, about simple moral analysis of human weaknesses. If what the young adventurers are going to find out is that some of their forebears said no to greed, the build-up should be lighthearted--how much better things are without the greed. People who want to shudder at the end of each chapter want to discover people who let greed turn them into dragons or vampires. It's harder to write a credible story about how human beings realized that they were living in a nice neighborhood and didn't want to ruin it, so I can understand why North tried to write this story as horror, but I think the story doesn't work as horror, isn't funny enough as a parody of horror, and should have been worked up into that credible story about preserving niceness.