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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