This is an intense one. I didn't realize it was set right in my neighborhood. Sort of. Geographically, it's in the neighborhood where I live now. ( I ride my bike across Ravenna Park every day to and from work.) Psychologically, my experience of those mid-70s years was painfully similar to what these characters experience. Still, I know those people and those places. Harrowingly surrealistic. Though we didn't have the same bug virus out on the Prairie, we had all the other behavioral eccentricities and afflictions described here.
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Gross! ( )

Teenage angst/lust as body horror set against the doped up 1970s. Black Hole centers on a group of teens in the suburbs of ‘70s Seattle whose community is plagued by a sexually transmitted disease that shows up as various mutations in the afflicted. The story felt a bit long and meandering but I loved Charles Burns' black and white illustrations. And there are definitively a few disturbing scenes of body horror. Read this as a companion to the film It Follows. ( )

Adolescent angst made into a surreal horror story with near constant dark vulvar imagery. Not that interesting to an old man, but brilliantly done. ( )

This graphic novel is set in 1970s suburban Seattle. A group of high school kids are aware of a sexually-transmitted plague affecting some of them, that leads to hideous deformities. Some deformities are extreme, others can be covered up, but all are irreversible. Most victims eventually feel the need to exclude themselves from society and go live in the woods. But the woods are not safe.

Laced into this story are familiar themes of teenage, alienation, self-loathing, tentative steps into first love, and cruel mockery. The plague's deformities could be taken as a physical symbol of the kind of stigma that is often attached to promiscuous teenagers in small communities. Once you are ostracised, your only real option may be to leave.

This book is eerie, creepy, spaced-out, romantic, erotic and weird. The black and white art is superb, and Burns avoids the more cliched plot developments in favour of something more subtle. The only criticism I could really make is that there is perhaps a bit too much teen angst, but I suppose that is a necessary part of it. ( )