Black Hole by Charles Burns

It's the bad place I always come back to in my dreams.

A strange disease, one that afflicts only teenagers and is spread by primarily sexual activity, arrives in a small town somewhere. The symptoms, strange and inexplicable mutations, vary from person to person--some kids end up with horribly deformed faces, lumps of tissue on their necks, strange orifices in places they shouldn’t be. For some teens, the mutations are severe enough that they leave town and join an outsider community in the woods nearby. No adults ever visit--there are very few adults in the book at all, and the ones that do show up seem curiously unconcerned with the disease, whatever it is.

A sense of surrealism suffuses the whole work, created over a decade by cartoonist Charles Burns. Lynchian is such an easy, overused descriptor, but how else to quickly evoke the atmosphere of a graphic novel where teenagers shed their (entire) skin, grow lizard-like tails, and participate in a strange and sometimes violent community in the woods, while the world around them goes on as if nothing is happening?

We spend most of our time with four teenagers: Chris, a model student who contracts the virus after a liaison in the woods and consequently begins periodically shedding her entire skin, kinda like a snake; Rob, the other participant in said liason, whose mutation exhibits as a tiny mouth in his neck that can’t stop saying disturbing things at the wrong time; Eliza, who has a lizard-like tail that breaks off periodically and regrows; and Keith, who contracts the virus from Eliza, and whose infection causes vivid hallucinations. The relationship between the four and the group of mutated exiles who live in the woods form the book’s narrative backbone and drive the murder mystery that propels the plot, such as it is.

The specifics of the storyline are as strange as you might expect from the premise, but much of that strangeness comes not from the twists and turns of the story itself, most of which are about what you’d expect--there’s a love triangle and plenty of teenage angst, sex, and drug use--but from Burns’ artwork, built out of thick black lines and monochrome inks. There are no colors or shades of gray here, literally. Whether this is a thematic comment on the ways teenagers tend to see the world, one can only speculate. But it’s quite striking and the detail and composition of almost every page is breathtakingly intricate, extremely creepy, and filled with recurrent visual motifs. as in the spread below:

This is a story about the body--the way it changes, the way it wrests control away especially in the teenage years, about the alienation that comes from being different/other and everything that comes with it. Interestingly, reading up on the book after I finished it, I learned that this collected edition doesn’t include various in-story letters and yearbook entries that the individual issues contained, extra content which includes something crucial to interpreting the story, and one that makes it bleaker than it appears on first read--that after some time, the virus runs its course and most of the infected return to normal. In light of the paths taken by the teenagers here, many of which end up homeless, messed up, or dead, it would’ve been nice to have included that information here.

That said, I did find a few things frustrating. The characters can be difficult to distinguish, particularly Rob and Keith, and there’s little humor or tonal variation here. As a whole, it works--it even has an ambiguously hopeful ending--but I had to take it in pieces and flip back and forth a few times to figure out who was doing what, especially in the last book when all the plotlines are playing out together.

There were a few plot developments I never really did understand, but perhaps that’s a feature in a world like this one, where the characters live their whole lives without ever understanding what’s happening to them. The obscurity of what’s given to the reader mirrors the confusion of the kids involved without using that as an excuse to be fully inscrutable--a neat trick that most books like this don’t pull off. It’s hard to know what to make of Black Hole as a total work, but that seems fine. It’s not like anyone living it is able to put it all together either.