This is where the book’s female heroine, Chris, goes after she is inflicted with the disease (following a fling with the ill-fated Rob), and gains the rather awkward ability to shed her skin like a snake. The more disgustingly deformed set out for a campground in the woods where they live apart from the rest of the population, venturing in only to dive the dumpsters for food, or bum a shower from a sympathetic friend. Teenagers are isolated and alienated, and sex is seen as a mysterious, fearful talisman - so in the world of Black Hole, those who transgress sexually are cursed with some form of disfigurement, be it a rather innocuous tail growing from the posterior or a full-on ghoulish corpse makeover. These questions are beside the point, because the mutant “plague” that engulfs the narrative is little more than a metaphor.
None of the adults in this small, tightly knit town notice when their children start turning into tentacled, werewolf-faced, gangrenous mutants? Furthermore, is this a localized plague or is the entire nation feeling its effects? Why can’t they simply buy a pack of condoms? For all the dozens of cast members who weave through the book, there are only one or two perfunctory appearances by adults, almost on the level of the squonking trumpet teachers from the Peanuts cartoon. But more conspicuous still in their almost total absent are the parents. There are no mentions of Watergate or even Vietnam - surely high among the concerns of any American teenager growing up in the era of Ziggy Stardust. The world is presented as our own - there are numerous references to Aladdin Sane-era Bowie and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (although, sadly, no appearance by Tarkus) - but every effort is meant to keep the story tightly focused on the concerns of its principle characters. The book follows the outbreak of a strange disfiguring disease among the teenage population of a small Washington state high school in the early 1970s. These facets of the story - all facets of the story not pertaining to the principle notions of alienation and paranoia endemic to the teenaged classes across the industrialized West - are glossed over in favor of a loose, diaphanous metaphorical structure that proves as intense, and ultimately as intensely anticlimactic, as the very act of growing up itself. That it takes place in the 1970s and is preoccupied with the concept of mutation and deformity is of little consequence. And yet that is exactly what Black Hole is and aspires to be, the archetypal high school experience printed on high-quality paper and bound between two thick, hard covers. It is hard enough to be a teenager once the idea of having to relive the high school experience again is almost too obscene to bear.
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