Charles Burns

As exciting as a pile of cracker crumbs...?That's what Kyra White's ex thinks of her. Well, she'll show him — and every other guy who's ever dumped her! Toting the book that will transform her into a sex kitten in twelve simple steps, gal-next-door Kyra sets out to go from blah to breathtaking with the help of blond hair dye and barely there clothing.But architect and best friend Michael Romero isn't so sure he likes the new Kyra. With her fresh confidence and "come on to me" looks, she's making it even more difficult for him to keep his feelings for her under wraps, but he'd better soon reveal that his attraction runs more than skin-deep because now that Kyra's making serious waves in the XY gene pool, her makeover could turn into his game over.

Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s not turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

"The long, strange trip that began in X'ed Out and continued in The Hive reaches its mind-bending, heartbreaking end, but not before Doug is forced to deal with the lie he's been telling himself since the beginning. In this concluding volume, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality" --