Reviews
The story started out great, but it started getting too gross too soon. Didn't do much for me.
adolescent psychedelia … it was okay. if there’s a greater metaphor it was lost on me
hq de dst
Great but impossible to enjoy. It’s horror - and there is a terrible plague - but the real horror is your unforced bad decisions, heinous misspeaking, thoughtless cruelty. The presentation is a sick dream. People do irreversible things all the time, but a nicer world would save people who didn’t know what they were doing (any of us).
So I usually like weird stuff. This was certainly weird and definitely not my thing. If you like feeling you're on an acid trip and body horror, go ahead and read this. However, I think Junji Ito would be better for acid trips and body horror, and not a waste of my time.
Teenage angst/lust as body horror set against the doped up 1970s. Black Hole centers on a group of teens in the suburbs of ‘70s Seattle whose community is plagued by a sexually transmitted disease that shows up as various mutations in the afflicted. The story felt a bit long and meandering but I loved Charles Burns' black and white illustrations. And there are definitively a few disturbing scenes of body horror. Read this as a companion to the film It Follows.
A darkly beautiful exploration of the horrors and isolation of adolescence. It feels quite Lynchian and meditative in movement, never needing to get behind the mystery of the sexually transmitted disease that affects the youth in the story. They feel the effects of isolation by society, their peers and especially those close to them however at the same time they are brought together in this shared experience.
2.5
This book was just fine. The artwork was pretty sometimes, but I wish we had gone a little more in depth about not just the characters but also this STD-mutation thing. Instead, most of this book is just three dudes getting high and feeling sorry for themselves lol.
This was beautiful and haunting and created a really vividly creepy atmosphere, but also maybe sexist? Definitely sexist; there was vagina-as-infectious-wound imagery. But I can't get it out of my head.
