Reading Response to "Black Hole"

My first response to this graphic novel by Charles Burns in general is that it was very weird. I think I would describe it as a sort of acid-trip-meets-coming-of-age story. I tried really hard to like it. I really wanted to, but the story line was unclear throughout most of the beginning, and the character designs all looked the same. It wasn't until the very end that the plot really started to make sense and get interesting, and then that really great writing that was leading to a potentially fantastic ending just stopped.

The book was introduced to me as a horror story, but I also feel as if the aspect of horror didn't come in until the end. Sure, the teenagers were dealing with this sexually transmitted disease that caused bodily mutations, but besides the fact that it made them look weird, (growing tails, extra mouths, lumpy skin etc.) the mutations weren't actually doing any harm. The only horror that came in was when one of the teenagers, after being ostracized for the mutation making his face look like a cat's, decided to put it on himself to "cleanse" the town of the mutation. And by cleanse I mean murder.

The book focuses on two teenagers who feel trapped in their town. Chris, who's the popular pretty girl and whose character is defined by who she sleeps with (ugh, please stop this trope), and Keith, a dork who crushed hard on Chris, but is also addicted to drugs. Oh yeah, did I mention this book takes place in the 1970's? I wasn't kidding when I said it was like an acid trip. Keith actually trips on acid at one point in the book, which had me wondering if any of the mutations were real at all, or if everything was just the result of someone's high?

Other things happen. Chris runs away from home, falls in love with the guy she got "the Bug" from while camping out in the woods, Keith meets a girl named Eliza who's called the "Lizard Queen" due to her tail, both main characters have reoccurring dreams of worm people and skin shedding, and no parent seems worried at all.

Overall the book did keep giving me small promises of hope that I might start to like it, but in the end, it's not one I'm really eager to pick up and read again. Keith was a fairly unlikable character, who's arc only led to him leaving town with Eliza, and Chris was characterized by her sexuality and her arc ended with her committing suicide. There's a lot of metaphor swirling around here, but without the cohesive story telling, I'm not so inclined to look for them.