Black Hole

Black Hole gave me nightmares. I actually had trouble sleeping after I read it, and after finally falling asleep, I had nightmares. I suppose that is the mark of an effective book; what piece has done a better job dealing with horrifying adolescent experiences? This work captures the anxieties of adolescence, and perhaps better than any other book we have read, it captures those anxieties about sex and death. It stuck with me in the most macabre, horrifying ways.

Charles Burns does a great job of creating a world that is simultaneously both terrifying and utterly familiar. He sets Black Hole in a very specific time and place, and this is impossible to avoid, the hair styles and fashion choices immediately place the reader in the 1970s. The concrete setting of this story in a particular place and time makes it all the more eerie later on. The characters were shocking to look at, but wholly relateable in their fears, their transgressions, and their relationships. Burns is very in tune with the anxieties of teenagers, and deals with them in an incredibly powerful manner. The conversations and narration were so realistic, which made me feel a very powerful mixture of revulsion and empathy.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the story, while obviously fantastical, is based on Burns’ own experiences growing up in the Seattle area during the 1970s. On the cover leaflet he first shows himself as a young man during the 1970s, on the back leaflet he becomes a balding, sickly old man. Clearly he must have one of the most horrifying imaginations in the world, but it is interesting to wonder what formative experiences he would have had growing up, especially since he chose to position such a terrifying book in a place and time so completely familiar to him.

Burns makes great use of stark black and white contrasts – I can’t imagine this piece having the same sort of creepy power or eerie atmosphere in color, and his creativity is manifested brilliantly in the art work, where he invents a number of uniquely horrifying diseases and disfigurements. Some of the images, especially the montage at the end which portrays all of the teenagers after they have caught this terrible bug, were deeply unsettling; the bug reveals itself in a number of ways, each one horrifying in its own sense. The idea that some people’s disfigurements were readily apparent (forcing them to hide away from society) while other people were able to keep theirs well hidden was fascinating. Some of the images were so bizarrely affecting, so disquieting, that the only appropriate response was to laugh at the awful absurdity of it.

The ending, which I found profoundly beautiful, reminded me of Night Fisher in a number of ways; the troubled teenager lies down within the natural world, gazing upwards and finally finding a sense of place. In this book I found it even more discomforting; she’s starving, all alone in the world, freezing cold, but still in the only place where she knows peace. Despite losing everything she loves and feeling alienated from the world, Chris finally has a place. I found this ending to be the most moving one of any of the stories that we have read, and a large part of why this book was so powerful to me. The final sentiment concerns the immense beauty in life despite the most unfathomable hardship; it may be a bit of a cliché , but Burns expresses it better than nearly anyone, using horror as his medium. The simple last frame showing the starry sky ties in beautifully with all of the other celestial themes in the book (black holes, Planet Xeno). I think it was the loveliest way that Burns could have ended such a horrifying book.

Side note: This isn’t relevant to my post in any way, but I really wish that Burns had a better editor/proof-reader. He spells the name “McCrosky” in two different ways, and has a lot of grammatical/spelling errors throughout this book. Silly things like this shouldn’t be such a distraction for me, but they were.