Black Hole by Charles Burns

This is the book I was running away from when I read two Georgette Heyer novels this weekend. Black Hole has been on my list for way too long. It's brilliant, and I wanted to buy it, but it was just too spendy and too heavy - both emotionally and physically. I kept picking it up and putting it down.

It's a graphic novel set in an alternate 1970's suburban Seattle. A weird disease changes people's bodies in unpredictable ways. The art is haunting & bizarre, white on black with a visceral quality that literally made me sick to my stomach a couple of times.


'It' is transmitted by sex, and only affects teenagers. We follow the stories of Chris and Keith, who each come in contact with the disease in different ways.

Ugh - take a trip back to high school, and then add horrible nightmarish stuff on top of the already horrifying experiences you remember.There are some very trippy dream sequences. This was very difficult to read. But it needed to go back to the library, so after reading two Heyers as insulation I picked it back up again and struggled through.

Good - sad - serious art. Extremely uncomfortable on every level. Not only did the art make me nauseated a couple of times, but there were at least two times when I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment - remembered or symnpathetic? Hard to tell.