Quest for a loathsome figure that has haunted Pip Durrant since childhood. He is now on a quest to find the Codex in the hope that it will help him overcome this evil.
In the year 2024, middle-aged Pip Durrant has become a successful author on sabbatical at Oxford University, but is still troubled by harrowing visions of the supernatural figure who has dogged him since childhood: the loathsome Piper. He is now on a quest to find the Piper's blasphemous autobiography, the Codex' in the hope that it will help him finally to overcome this ancient evil. But as events lead him and his friends back to the Romanian village of Arva, with its gruesome history of ritual child rape and murder, what new terrors lie in store for them?
Excerpt
Rigid with fear, he watched it approach him across the carpet. The whole of his body felt like a band of worn-out elastic as he tried to spring from the chair but couldn’t move. Then he could feel the heat from it, licking at his toes, burning his shoes. A second later, it leapt onto his knees, and he was scorching. Inside, he could feel his body fat melting, as if he were in a furnace. He pressed his shoulders and back into the chair as the light hovered over his thighs, then felt searing agony as it flattened and crept through him, sucking his life into its gaping hole of a mouth as it curled itself into a ball again. He watched the tops of his legs descend into a lake of burning fat and he screamed, taking the fire into his mouth. He watched it reach his chest, then hollow out the cavity with hungry lips. The thudding of his heart in his ears ceased. A deathly quiet descended as his living brain considered its final exit from pain. He looked down. None of him remained, except for his smoking shoes, which were floating in his body grease … He lifted his eyes and gazed about the room. He tried to move, and no movement came. He reached out his arms, but found they were gone; and yet he retained every memory of movement, of everything that was familiar. He thought then that he was dead, and struggled to find some way back to the reality he remembered. Slowly and painfully, he recovered from his vision; and when he did, he discovered something that terrified him. The chair beneath him was smoking. It had a charred patch where he had been sitting and the back was wet, not with water, but with a stinking, discoloured grease. The realisation struck a brutal blow. He had shared the experience of Simionce’s death. It was too much to take in. He vomited then, as he always did after one of his visions; not in the lavatory pan, but right there, in front of the chair.
Professional Reviews
Intense and fascinating novel
By Jane on 8 Sept. 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
It's hard to imagine a more intense and complex book than The Codex by Helen McCabe, and to be completely honest, I'm still reeling a little bit from having finished it! There is just so much in here that it is difficult to know where to start. Although this is the third and final installment in a trilogy, this is an easy book to get into if you have not read the other two, and I definitely now want to go back and explore more of Pip and understand the complicated journey that's been taken, because there is so much richness in the narrative that really makes you think. Part mystery, part thriller, part sci-fi, part historical . . . the list goes on, but McCabe manages to keep all of these plates spinning in an impressive way. I really loved her descriptions of the different places, so alive and so vibrant that I really felt as though I was there, and the ending: no spoilers of course, but you definitely have to read this book!
An exercise in making sense of reality
By Quantium on 5 Oct. 2016
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
The Codex is the third in the trilogy after Piper and The Piercing. The concept of a trilogy is that the plot is finished by the end, but this trilogy does leave a lot unanswered. Although The Codex is largely set in future dates there is little sci-fi, apart from the appearance of autonomous cars on the streets. This is more or less fact in a few places now anyway. These books are really supernatural or spiritual horror stories, in the vein of Edgar Poe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, HP Lovecraft and so on. Although these stories and ideas can just be read to take some delight in schadenfreude like the works of the aforementioned authors there are things to make readers think. For example, there was a hint of nested novels. The protagonist is trying to express his researches by writing them and presenting them as fictional events in a novel.
The idea of cycles continuing throughout history is well founded in many writings, such as Asimov’s Foundation series of sci-fi novels, or the Kondratiev wave used by some investment analysts. The average individual’s lifespan is the source of other such cycles, and once something such as National Socialist political systems pass out of living memory they can re-appear under a slightly different guise. Here is there is a hint of a supernatural being, who is either immortal and invulnerable or who regenerates like Dr Who. But it is only a hint and really the Piper universe is never precisely defined or explained, although there are several attempts to link it into legends, superstitions or religions in what we consider to be reality.
So if the reader is forming his own theories as to what is going on, he will never find whether they are affirmed or not. As some other reviewers have said, the books certainly were written with some literary skill and one does not get bored whilst reading them. It is obviously better to read the first two first, but people picking up just the last could read it on its own.
Maybe some people read these sort of books as an exercise in trying to make some sense out of the reality within which we all find ourselves. Maybe from that point of view it doesn’t really matter that we aren’t given an answer at the end. We have still done the exercise.
Medieval Hardcore Horror visits the 21st Century
By Amazon Customer on November 8, 2016
Ever since I saw the quaint, historical town of Hamlein from atop the shoulders of my father and chortled in delight at the re-enactment of the Pied Piper with his flute, luring the town’s children away, I’ve been absorbed by the genre. Of course, as a toddler I didn’t know it wasn’t real. Yet, that notion returns to bite me in the bum with Helen McCabe’s Piper trilogy. Why? Because The Codex didn’t stop in the middle ages. The piper is transformed and with us today!
The eponymous object, The Codex, refers to an ancient alternative Bible compiled by the dark side around 800 AD. Evil leaks from this tome and part of the mission by Pip is to seek the whole of the Codex and render it harmless. Forces are out to stop him and manifest themselves in unknown ways. This is a quest and in a kind of recursive, self-referencing way. I yearn to write a successful recursive story and find them as rare as black daisies. Not that the Codex has recursive elements. For instance it is the third volume of a trilogy. The protagonist is a writer needing to promote his third book of a trilogy, which in itself is a kind of Codex. It’s as if the readers are invited to be involved in drawing out the hidden elements of horror and evil not just written as writhing inside this novel.
As usual McCabe is a mistress of the artful word although I’m uncertain whether the Codex itself has its finger on her pen as for example: “ ...a headache...skinny string reediness that crept through his skull and stuck like a hapless insect in his memory web.” The author is enviably skilled in oblique dialogue – I already refer my editing clients to chunks of her Piper stories for these writing masterclass elements.
Interesting left-field logic is used throughout such as should a virgin avoid the beast’s attention by giving herself to a willing lad and so change her sexual status?
In Codex we have medieval hardcore horror meeting the 21st Century where “secrets breed lies”
