Charles Burns
Black Hole (2005)
Author: Charles Burns
Genre: Graphic Novel (Science Fiction/Horror)
Plot Summary:
This book is the two separate stories of teenagers Chris and Keith, whose lives intersect and overlap at points. Chris is popular; she goes to a lot of parties and has a lot of friends, and one night, while she's at a party, she finally gets the opportunity to sleep with Rob, a boy she's had a crush on for quite a while. After a week or so, Chris discovers that she has caught "the bug" from Rob. The bug is a sexually transmitted disease that's spreading among the teens in Seattle; it mutates its victims in various ways, ranging from sprouting tails and mouths in new locations to becoming horribly disfigured, facially. Chris runs away from home and sets up camp in the woods, with Rob coming every night to bring her supplies and spend the night. Everything is going reasonably well until strange things begin to happen around Chris's camp, culminating in Rob's disappearance. Keith shares a biology class with Chris prior to her infection, and he has romantic feelings for her; he's also something of a nerd, and he maintains his friendships with other of his friends who have caught the disease and gone to live as outcasts in the woods. When he sees Chris on one of his visits to the woods, he invites her back to a house he's housesitting; she stays there for awhile, rebuffing his romantic advances but accepting his friendship. SPOILER:Chris invites the other infected back to the house as well, and when Keith returns to the house one night, he discovers that Chris is gone and the other infect have all been the victim of a shooting by another victim of "the bug" who has also had deep romantic feelings for Chris. Chris runs away, remaining isolated and living on the fringes of society. Keith forms a relationship with Eliza, a troubled young woman who was living in a house with some serious drug dealers when the two first met, and slept together. Keith becomes infected, but it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on him, and he goes about his life ordinarily, until he discovers the bodies of his former friends. Then Keith and Eliza run off together as well, and the two seem to be reasonably in love and content in the end.
Geographical Setting: Seattle, WA
Time Period: 1970s
Appeal Characteristics:
There are two main characters in this story and then a large cast of supporting characters, a few of whom are well-developed and interesting. All of the characters are teenagers. The first-person point of view alternates between these two characters, and the reader is expected to be able to empathize with both of them, even though they are both very different. Chris begins as a popular girl, who has lots of friends and attends lots of parties and is looking for love; when she contracts the disease, she is completely unable to cope, withdrawing from society and isolating herself. Keith begins as a nerd, with a few close friends and a crush on Chris. Eventually, though, his desire to find somewhere he belongs and someone to belong with leads him to Eliza, and his attraction to her, and his eventual love, lead him to knowingly put himself in the path of the infection. Chris and Keith have very different reactions to the disease, and their lives after infection go in very different directions. The novel is engrossing; the plot doesn't move along particularly quickly, but the characters and the storyline are so compelling that it's easy to lose yourself in the story. Both the characters and the plot are slow to develop, and the characters definitely react to events just about all of the time. The character whose point of view the story is being told switches between the main two characters, and there are several flashbacks and flash-forwards in the story. The end isn't really the point of the novel--the comics were initially published in serial form, and this novel definitely felt like it was more about enjoying the read than finding out what would happen. The storyline is very much concerned with the characters; the focus is on the characters' emotional states and how they fell and behave in stressful, dangerous, and even horrific situations. While there is a plot and some action--the shooting of the group of infected, even that is mostly used as a way to further explore the characters' states of mind.
The frame of this novel is somewhat ambiguous; although I have read that it is set in Seattle in the 70's, the text never makes that clear. It feels as though the book is set in a small town, because we very rarely see any people that aren't actual characters in the book, with speaking parts and names, and the vast majority of the characters are members of this group of infected. This is a serious book, without any real humor to it, that emphasizes the psychological and the philosophical. The story is told from two different points of view, with a lot of flashbacks and interjections from supporting characters that slow and confuse the story; it is difficult, at times, to understand what's going on, because the story occurs on so many different levels. The tone of the book is extremely dark and tense, and most of that is due to the illustrations;the black-and-white images are almost all more black than white, with a lot of shadows that lend a sense of lurking evil. A lot of the story takes place at night, in the woods, and that setting gives an ominous feeling as well. The actual text in the book is about 60% thought-narration from the main two characters, 40% dialogue from the entire cast. The dialogue is exactly what you'd expect from a group of authority-defying teenagers; short, incomplete sentences that use a lot of slang. The narration is also written fairly conversationally, with a lot of slang and sentence fragments, but there are also passages that are more poetic, employing a great deal of metaphor and containing a lot of description.
Read-alikes: Fans of Black Hole may appreciate Daniel Clowe's Like a Velvet Glove, Cast in Iron, the story of a man named Clay Loudermilk who watches a movie so bizarre that he oes on a mission to find out more about it. His journeys, all of which begin ordinarily enough, become twisted, fantastical, and horrifying in turns. This collection of comics is more humorous than Black Hole, but the tone is nevertheless surreal, dark and disturbing in a way that might appeal to those who enjoyed Burn's work. The pacing is also very similar; Like a Velvet Glove, Cast in Iron takes real concentration in order to understand what is really going on, because the situations are so strange and there are multiple levels of storytelling, but the storyline and situations are so compelling that the book draws you in, despite the confusion. David B's Epileptic may also appeal to those who enjoyed Black Hole. Epileptic is an autobiographical graphic work that shows the life of Pierre-Francois, growing up in a house with his seriously ill, epileptic brother, Jean-Christophe. Pierre-Francois and his family gradually come to accept that Jean-Christophe will never be free of his illness, and eventually they notice that, of all the people that are working to conquer, or at least combat, the epilepsy, Jean-Christophe is putting forth the least effort. The main character in this book, a somewhat lost boy who is struggling to live his life and find his own way in the midst of the desperation and heartbreak of his brother's sickness, may appeal to those who empathized with the desperate struggles of the characters in Black Hole to find a way to live through their own illnesses. The storyline, which focuses on the emotional and the psychological effects of this illness on the characters, will also appeal to those who enjoyed that aspect of Black Hole. Locas: Maggie and Hopey Stories by Jaime Hernandez is a collection of stories about a pair of Hispanic women in the 1980s, living an outrageous, punk rock lifestyle; the two main characters are Maggie and Hopey, and the central focus of the collection is on their relationship and eventual romance. The characters young women who recognize no real authority, who get distracted by minor problems and minor romances and lose their paths, and who find their way to each other in the end, will appeal to those who enjoyed the subtle romance between Keith and Eliza in Black Hole. The artwork in Locas: Maggie and Hopey Stories is also similar to that in Black Hole, though of course, as the subject matter is less bizarre and dark, so will be the artwork. The styles of the two artists share clean, sharp lines, and subtle yet emotive facial expressions on the characters. Those who enjoyed the storyline of Black Hole, with its minimal plot and focus on the psychological, as well as its construction of being told through flashbacks, will enjoy those same aspects in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Jimmy is a useless, friendless man who was abandoned by his father when he was young, and this novel is the story of their reunion, and of the history of the Corrigan men, each generation of whom have been making similar mistakes, each of which has compounded to leave Jimmy in the state in which he finds himself. The character of Jimmy, a profoundly lonely, isolated man who doesn't seem to have a place in the world, may appeal to those who appreciated those characteristics in the ostracized and diseased characters in Black Hole. Uzumaki by Junji Ito, is about a small town in Japan that is plagued by smoke spirals that emerge from cremated bodies, only to infect the people of town; the people are affected in various ways, from going completely mad to sprouting bizarre appendages. These events are shown through the eyes of a school girl named Kirie, whose life is unchanged while she's at school or at home, even while the outside world is becoming a terrifying and chaotic place. Those who enjoyed the dark, angst-filled horror of Black Hole will also appreciate it in this horror series. Fans of Charles Burn's art may also enjoy the art in Uzumaki, which, while a different, more traditionally manga style than Burn's, is also done in black and white, with a lot of dark shading that helps to set the creepy tone; the artwork approaches the bizarre and terrifying subject matter, as it does in Black Hole, completely unflinchingly, simply depicting the images in the artist's head without shrinking away from the impact of the images. For a graphic novel with a similar coming-of-age theme and deep character development, try Craig Thompson's Blankets, which tells the story of the author's childhood and adolescence. In the novel Under the Overtree by James A. Moore, an adolescent boy finds himself channeling an ancient power to take revenge. This book may serve readers who enjoyed Black Hole's dark, contemplative tone and rich characters, but wanted something with a bit more supernatural development. Those who enjoyed Burns' artistic style and didn't mind the violence and sexuality of this work may also enjoy Frank Miller's gritty noir series, Sin City. The first book, The Hard Goodbye uses a similarly angular, black-and-white style to tell the story of Marv, who has been framed for a murder. A similarly dark graphic novel with psychological undertones is Alan Moore's From Hell, which retells the story of Jack the Ripper in stylized pen-and-ink illustrations.
Red Flags: Images of and references to drug use, sex, violence, and physical deformities. Explicit nudity.
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