Black Hole by Charles Burns Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Black Hole
Book Review: Unsettling, but what's the point?
Summary: 2 Stars
The central conceit of Black Hole is intriguing: Imagine an alternate version of the '80s in which there exists a sexually transmitted disease, referred to by the characters only as "The Bug," that causes bizarre deformities. The symptoms of The Bug, as we see it wreaking havoc on a cast of mostly high schoolers, vary widely. A group of geeks have been so horribly wracked by the disease that they live in the woods, ostracized by society. The more popular characters develop less obvious but weirder alterations, such as the second mouth on Rob's chest (which even speaks sometimes). One girl merely grows a tail.
All of this is accepted by the characters as normal, so apparently The Bug has been around for a while; we never get any backstory on it. In fact, there's little story to speak of: a couple of romances, a handful of murders. It never really comes together. This is an art comic first and foremost. And the art is... well, it's memorable. Everything about Black Hole is memorable.
But that's not necessarily a good thing. After finishing the book, I was left with the feeling that something deeply disturbing had happened, and little else. I'd been given a glimpse of an interesting world populated by largely uninteresting characters, high schoolers who, despite the lurking presence of The Bug, seem primarily concerned with getting laid and getting high. John Hughes it ain't. Rather than mocking these teenagers for their short-sighted, superficial concerns, Black Hole takes them seriously, exaggerating their adolescent turmoil to the point that it seems to take priority over the world's very real problems.
Stories about puppy love can be terrific--see the heart-warming Blankets, for instance--but the surreal disease at the heart of the comic only serves to make the romances frivolous. It's all about The Bug. Love is just a carrier.
Book Review: Very Satisfying
Summary: 4 Stars
Touted as `one of the most stunning graphic novels yet published' by Time magazine, Charles Burns's Black Hole had a lot to deliver just to be deemed adequate. A bit to my surprise, I found it an excellent and haunting story, with several stylistic choices that really enhanced Burns's narrative.
Set in mid 1970s Seattle, the narrative focuses on a group of teens who are infected with a mysterious, sexually transmitted disease that causes all manner of mutations and leaves them outcasts from society. One boys face turns feline, another girl sheds her skin, while yet another grows a second mouth on his lower neck. Though many of these teens are involved in the drug culture, Burns avoids a judgmental stance by presenting several people who are users and having sex yet do not contact the `bug.'
It is refreshing to see teenagers written in a believable way. Too often I have read books or seen movies, most recently Juno, where it is impossible to believe that a person that age would say those things or have those thoughts. Yet throughout the novel, I felt my own teen years conjured up, and seeing how Keith pines for Chris only to have his love unrequited, I remembered how I felt the same way in high school. And while I wasn't around in the mid-1970s, the elements of the drug culture seemed to be accurate to me as well.
Instead of exploring the origin of the disease, Burns is more interested in how its presence affects those who are infected. Their relationships with each other and the outside world are altered, often tragically, yet a chord is struck between the alienation these teens feel and the alienation we all felt as we were growing up. Perhaps we didn't have strange growths coming off of our bodies, but in a sense we were all infected.
Burns uses varying perspectives, often of the same material, in order to tell his story. The inner monologues of Chris, Rob, and Keith are poignant, and it is interesting to note that the fourth major character, Eliza (the sexy woman with the tail), never serves as the point of view in the narrative. Wavy lines are used to border panels that show the past or contain dreams, blurring the line between memory and fantasy.
There is no gray in this comic: only black and white. Mostly black. In the world of Black Hole, there are only two ways to end, happily or horribly. And the dominance of black is reflected by the ending, with the majority of characters meeting not so happy fates.
Burns also shifts visual perspectives from panel to panel is striking ways, often blending faces together. In one instance, he splits the faces of Rob and Chris and sets them side-by-side, so that a reader must rely on the boxed text and dialogue to grasp that the face, which merges from the two panels, is actually two distinct faces. In another, the adjacent panels are aligned so that it appears the back of one character's head is spread between the two, yet Burns actually has this over the shoulder perspective flip from character to character, causing temporary confusion until one realizes that we are over Rob's shoulder in one perspective, and Chris's in the other. I know that images would help convey this better than I can with mere words, but I am unable to locate appropriate ones online.
My experience and knowledge aren't broad enough to judge whether Time's assertion is true, but I can say that Black Hole is an engaging and satisfying read. The narrative is compelling, but you would be doing yourself an injustice to not slow down and take in the artwork as well. A haunting read that will likely evoke your own feelings of adolescent alienation.
Book Review: Weird. Amazing! Weird!
Summary: 5 Stars
This graphic novel is just plain weird. Charles Burns, the writer and artist, uses very dark pages, nearly entirely covered with black India ink to tell the tale of teenagers in the 70s. Told from shifting points of view, this macabre story meanders, with the teenagers dealing with relationships, the opposite sex, drugs, and more sex. At times the teen angst of living at home with parents as a young adult is palpable.
Again, this story is just so weird: one girl grows a lizard tail and a guy grows an extra mouth in his neck. These strange deformities all happen after having sex with one another. The weirdness pulls you in, and the art recalls the style of R. Crumb or a black velvet poster from the seventies. In other words, really cool. This book stayed with me for days... almost haunting me... the emotions felt so real and the story was so strange that I almost couldn't read it at night. Weird.
Book Review: Wonderfully Funny and Subversive
Summary: 5 Stars
Combining the best elements of sci-fi, horror, and those cheesy movies designed to scare teens in the '70s, Black Hole is wonderfully funny and subversive while also being genuinely thrilling and disturbing. In 1970s Seattle, a group of teens battles against sexual desires that threaten to leave them monstrously deformed. A new sexually transmitted disease has come alive, and there's no cure. The strange effects of the disease--different for everyone who catches it--mirror the pain and isolation of high school. Black Hole is tragicomic in the best sense of the word: It takes itself seriously, and so do its readers. How could you not? When one chance encounter with the wrong person could lead to a lifetime of horror, you can't help but be just a little bit nervous.
-- John Hogan
Book Review: a bit of a let down
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm never disappointed with Burns' artwork, and "The Bug" was a great vehicle for it, but I found little else with which to be impressed. The characters don't have that much personality, and what personality is there is stale and sort of cliche, especially the grown-ups. But it's the plot that really is rather lame. It goes nowhere in particular, and ends nowhere in particular.
(Spoiler warning)
The Bug takes a back seat to the whole of what little plot there is. Even what turns out to be the plot, the murder, seems to be incidental. It's mostly a Beach Blanket Bingo gone horribly wrong. Burns seems to be using a lot of teen sex and drug use to sell this, and it's probably a good idea, if you imagine how utterly dull this graphic novel would be without it. Startlingly so, considering there's an epidemic and a murder involved.
It does have the creepy, unsettling imagery that we've come to love about his comics, tho', and if you want to buy it for that, you've come to the right place. But if you're in the market for a sci-fi thriller, or a whodunit, you're sure to be disappointed. Certainly not his best work.