Black Hole Novel
WaPo reviews a new work of fiction by Charles Burns. It sounds pretty cool, and it reminds me of the theme behind E. Michael Jones' Monsters from the Id: pop culture reflects our society's buried fears about our moral transgressions. The horror flick, for instance, got popular in the late 1960s--at the exact time the sexual revolution was starting to fly. By the 1980s, a common theme had emerged in the horror flicks: the girls who get killed are the ones who are having pre-marital sex. Were the writers and directors of the films Puritans trying to get across a message? Hardly. Were the writers and directors reflecting a feeling that would resonate with the audience? Probably.
It sounds like this novel might make this connection explicit:
Black Hole covers the high school years of a group of kids who find themselves catching a venereal disease known as "the teen plague." After sex with an infected partner, they deform and mutate. The infected person might develop a tail, like Eliza, who encourages lovers to grab it during sex. Or there's Rob, who develops a second mouth on his lower neck. Some can hide it, but others turn into freakish social pariahs and join a teen leper colony in the woods. "It was like a horrible game of tag," writes Burns. "Once you were tagged, you were 'it' forever."
Chris is a typical victim: a straight "A" student from a good home. At a house party, she drinks and has sex outside with Rob, who gives her the plague. Days later, when she is skinny-dipping with friends, her skin peels loose like a reptile's. As much as Chris appears to fall from grace, this girl next door enjoys alcohol, exhibitionism and risky sex. She feels a stifling boredom in her overachieving, flat suburban world. After catching "the bug," Chris falls in love with Rob and moves in with other plague victims. But the same jealousies and rivalries that made them outcasts in high school develop again within their plague community, and soon passions lead to murder. The killer, living deeper in the woods than the other kids, hangs broken dolls from trees. If they are an obvious piece of symbolism, the dolls are also effectively frightening. It's in drawing them and a menagerie of warped faces that Burns makes use of his particular genius for the grotesque.
Link.
