For a small-town boy with no exposure to western philosophy, he opened the doors to this new animal called existentialism. My later love for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and all the various philosophies had their beginning with that one book – The Outsider. And thus began a path of discovery and self-discovery.

My continuing love for the occult, the esoteric arts and magik, began all those years ago, when as a impressionable young man, I discovered Aleister Crowley, Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Jung, all and more which were contained in that one book – The Occult. Thus began a lasting fascination and exploration of all these arcane subjects.

Pseudohistory, alternate history and lost civilisation, whole new world, or rather completely lost worlds were laid open by that one book – From Atlantis to the Sphinx. All the tomes and books I have read and own today on the subject are a direct result of the spark provided by that one book. And all written by that one man, the ‘Angry Young Men’ – Colin Wilson.

I couldn’t even begin to list out the other books of his which provided further direction to my reading habits and to subjects I could delve into deeper. From sex crimes and criminal histories to de Sade and sci-fi, horror and alternate realities. Yes, I have read much better books on each of these topics, but for a newbie these provided interesting enough to know further. And for that, Colin Wilson, thank you. And…
…to the only writer who has a shelf all his own in my library, R.I.P.

A wonderful 'magical' read...

The last time I read a non-china mieville book that won as many awards as Jo Walton’s Among Others was Paolo Bacigalupi’s Wind-up Girl which ended its course winning more awards than Among Others’ current tally. That’s probably as much as you can speak about the two in the same breath – as Among Others was (imho) as much a pleasure to read as Wind-up Girl was underwhelming.

And not just because Am

ong Others is an ode to classic SF (and fandom) and the love of books, as it a fabulous bildungsroman (I am a sucker for those). The first person epistolary narrative style just adds to the charm of this book. Now, is this narrator – a 16 year old girl who's just lost her twin, sees fairies, does magic, creates a karass all her own, and is running away from her evil (witch) mother – an unreliable narrator or not? Could go both ways depending on who is reading. When I first heard about the book it was posited as an anti-thesis to Harry Potter because the protagonist was a girl who knew magic and went to a regular, non-magic boarding school. But Among Others turned out to be so much more.

Magic is what you make of it; the closest the ‘magic’ in this book comes to is perhaps the ‘magic’ in Bridge to Terabithia. So in that sense, it is only ‘science fiction’ if you want it to be, and ‘fantasy’ if you say so.

Killing two birds with one book

Remember the first Ice Age movie? It was an animated movie, so naturally it was billed as ‘entertaining fare for children’. And enjoy they did, going by my nephews and nieces or children of friends. But you know who enjoyed the film more? The people who used to be children till a decade or more ago, and some who are children still, albeit with beards, moustaches, wives and credit card debts. So while Ice Age was great fun for the child in us – and I don’t mean this in the sense of being pregnant – it was great pun for the adults that we supposedly are. Adults in terms of having read enough, gone through life, watched enough movies than the average bear cub. The puns (taekwon-dodo!) , the contextual insinuations, the absurdness of dodos preparing for the ice age with just three melons (melons, as in the fruit, you dutty bugger). See what I mean. It takes an adult to get that joke. You can’t expect a 10-14 year old to get all of that. But that’s not to say they didn’t enjoy Ice Age. That’s where we ‘adults’ have an advantage – we used to be children once.

The same is the case with certain books. Conveniently billed ‘Young Adult’ fiction. But like not all books – in my highly subjective opinion - can be truly enjoyed by adults as well (and this coming from me, who still reads Three Investigators still). So assuming you’re looking for a fun read that takes you back to the ‘good fun’ days of adventurous adolescence, but one that also offers the ‘adult’ in you a second layer of fun and added reading pleasure (and if you wish, one that you can deconstruct, look at it from a societal perspective, etc. etc.), here’s a short random list from theBekku, of ‘young adult' books.

All of these books fall under the same category as say, The Hobbit, which was primarily for children but can be enjoyed by adults (unlike LOTR which was the opposite). And yes, Ice Age. This list is by no means exhaustive, by any measure. These are just the book’s I like enough personally to recommend. If there are any I’ve missed, or you think I should read, do a good turn and let me know in the comments section. And because fantasy, adventure, a sense of newness, discovery and wonder is according to me one of the chief emotions of young adult-hood, this list tilts more towards fantasy and plausible alternative worlds and situations rather than books like say, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Now, you’re either the kind of person who will take my word for it (for reasons known best to you) or the kind who will still Google the title/author and look it up on wikipedia/ amazon/ good reads. Thusly, this list is not accompanied by any descriptions or gushing praise, all I can say is that if you’re a reader you won’t regret the time you spend within these books. Get ready for subterranean cities, other worlds and other mothers, competitions, rumbling mobile metropolises, magic and fun.

China Mieville – Un Lun Dun

Ursula LeGuin – The Earthsea quartet (• A Wizard Of Earthsea • The Tombs of Atuan • The Farthest Shore • Tehanu)

Philip Pullman – His Dark Materials trilogy (• The Golden Compass • The Subtle Knife • The Amber Spyglass)

Neil Gaiman – Coraline

Neil Gaiman – The Graveyard Book

Philip Reeve – The Mortal Engines quartet (• Mortal Engines • Predator's Gold • Infernal Devices • A Darkling Plain

Jeanne DuPrau – Book of Ember quartet (• City of Ember • The People of Sparks • The Prophet of Yonwood • The Diamond of Darkhold)

Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games trilogy (• The Hunger Games • Catching Fire • Mockingjay)

Norton Juster – The Phantom Tollbooth

There you go. Will add more in a while or a bit, whichever is earlier.

And here’s how you kill two birds with one book.

Gift your son/daughter/nephew/niece any of the above (or all), and introduce them to new worlds of wonder and come across as a great father/father/uncle/aunt and when the brats are done with it, quietly borrow and read it. Or the other way ‘round. Also recommended for adults who want to buy it solely for themselves, for the children they are ;)

Word

Some authors fill a novel with futuristic scenery and jargon and then strenuously, even stertorously, deny that it's science fiction. No, no, they don't write that nasty stuff, never touch it. They write literature. Though curiously familiar with the tropes and conventions of the despised genre, they so blithely ignore the meaning of terms, they reinvent the wheel with such cries of self-admiration, that their endeavours seem a doomed effort to prove that one can write a novel without learning how.

– Ursula K Le Guin in her review of China Miéville's Embassytown

The Curious Case of the Missing Indian Jasoos

Amidst yesterday’s hauls which included yet another Dr. Gideon Fell mystery by John Dickson Carr was this: The House of Fear – containing 2 stories of the Imran series of detective fiction by Ibn-e-Safi. Translated from the Urdu of course.

With a quote by Agatha Christie thrown in for good measure, just in case you needed more reason to buy this book – apart from the fact that it is finally available at all. Tip of the hat to Jubin George for spotting this in the section where it was inadvertently kept – the heavy duty literature section which he usually haunts. Instead of the Crime/Mystery section where it belongs. But I digress (so what’s new?). The point of this post is not debate the literary merit of mystery and detective fiction, so let’s move on.

From the time I read my first Hardy Boys book in higher secondary – While the Clock Ticked, which also happened to be my first ‘English novel’ – I have been in love with the genre of detective fiction. The crime – a corpse or a robbery or both and more. A detective (a pair or with a sidekick) seeking out evidence. The red herrings that the author throws in. The linking together of various clues. The dénouement! Of course from here on it was but a natural progression to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. The discovery of Poe and finding Auguste Dupin. Reading about Simon Iff. The Dorothy Sayers books. No, for the purpose of this post, Dirk Gently is NOT a detective. But Asimov’s Black Widowers series is detective fiction, even though there are no crimes to speak of, but still problems solved. Current favourites being Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, Andrea Cammileri’s Salvo Montalbano and the aforementioned Dr. Gideon Fell. So on and so forth.

From a larger perspective, you could separate out Crime/Hardboiled fiction – Chandler, Hammet, Spillane et al and police procedurals and lawyers – from pure detective fiction of the private investigator or problem solver/trouble shooter kind who follows clues not procedures or rules of his own making. And feature in more than a couple of stories. The Holmeses, the Poirots, the Miss Marples, the Peter Wimseys etc. But if you’ve noticed there are hardly any Indian detectives on this list (the title of the post was a dead giveaway right? Drat! I’ll never make it as a writer of detective fiction.) But wait. There are!

Flashback to Doordarshan in the late eighties and we had Rajat Kapoor playing Byomkesh Bakshi – not a detective but a satyanveshi, a truth seeker – and his Dr.Watson, Ajit entertain us with some amazing stories. Then Ray’s Feluda happened. Good fun. Yes, Gajarchand, I mean Detective Karamchand was also there, but since he was born on television not in a book, he doesn’t make the cut. So we have Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi and Satyajit Ray’s Feluda. Homegrown Indian sleuths. Whose exploits are available in English. 2 volumes to each detective. And now hopefully House of Fear will see Ibn-e-Safi’s Imran being taken forward. That makes it three. Yes, there is Ibn-e-Safi’s other hero, Colonel Fareedi, but that’s more spy game than detective fun. So we’re still left with three. Ain’t there no more Indian detectives? Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada is again not so much detective fiction as it is tall stories and adventure stories. And all these were ages ago. Byomkesh in the early 20th. Feluda in the 60s & 70s. Imran in the 50s. Isn’t there any Indian sleuth in modern fiction???

Inspector Ghote!!! Yes. But wait. No. Sorry. The author is British. And Manjiri Prabhu’s Sonia Samarth series is basically chik-lit in the guise of detective fiction. With astrology thrown in for the cool factor and the exotic ingredient when selling to an unsuspecting western(ised) reader. Is the problem then one of unavailability in English? Which would give the detective a mainstream audience? Byomkesh and Feluda were both written in Bengali remember, and Imran in Urdu. I think not. Even if one were not able to read the stories one would still be in the know right? That so-and-so detective exists. Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Colonel Niladri Sarkar for instance. Originally in Bengali, and to the best of my knowledge unavailable in English. But while I may not have read any of these stories, I know they are there ready to be translated should a publisher see the commercial value in that and welcomed by eager readers in India and elsewhere. Perhaps there are some gems of a sleuth hidden away in Oriya? Marathi perhaps? I don’t know. If you do. Please let me know. Would like that. Yes, admittedly there is a rich tradition of pulp literature – but the protagonists there tends to crime and sensation. Or perhaps I need to change my strict. But that still does not explain the missing detective in modern Indian fiction? True, Amitav Ghosh's Calcutta Chromosome can be fitted under this, but it's a one-shot. Can Indians not write mystery/detective fiction? That probably brings us to the question – if we love detective fiction, why should there be an Indian detective? Is there a need really? Of course there’s no need. But it is still a different thing to read about familiar places, familiar phrases, to see familiar names in a genre that we so like. So where is the homegrown Indian jasoos? Exhuming Dame Christie, re-animating her and asking her – since she claims to have ‘knowledge of detective fiction in the subcontinent’ – is not an option. She’s be horribly out of date. Or perhaps not.

Of vengeful virgins and corpses that wear pasties

Once in a while along comes along a book you pick up just for its cover art alone. Doesn’t often happen to me. I go for what’s in between the covers. And sometimes I don’t need to rifle through the pages. As a friend once told me, I seem to have the ability to judge a book by its covers. Yep. I do. And modesty is not one of my virtues. But coming to the point, it’s rarer still when you have an entire imprint each worth picking up for the cover art alone. And yes, Hard Case Crime happened to me some time ago. As a fan of hard boiled crime and pulp fiction, it was but natural that I check them out – books by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Ed McBain, Max Allan Collins, what’s not to like. And one by, beleiev or not, Arthur Conan Doyle (The Valley of Fear). I do suggest you give them a look-in too, if you’re into hard-boiled crime and pulp or just like double-crossing, dangerous, skimpily clad hot women on your covers. But to be honest, some of the best books I’ve read in the Hard Case Crime series are the ones I picked up for their covers alone, and not going by the author or the plot or even the really neat by-lines that they have.

Case in point:

What a cover! The title was a bonus. C’mon it mentions nipple coverings and a dead body. What could be more pulp than that? No clue about the author who is the self-appointed ‘Burlesque Mayor of New York’ Jonny Porkpie. I really had no expectation whatsoever from the book per se, but when a book starts with a short letter to the publisher from the author (reproduced below) you know it’s gonna be a good ride.

Dear Charles,

Well, here it is, as requested, in all its obscene glory; a complete and mostly accurate of the events that led to the closing of a certain bar on Eleventh Street. I’ve played it as close to the truth as I can, but you know me; I might have throw in some slight exaggerations, the odd embellishment or two, and several completely fabricated erotic scenes. I just couldn’t resist.

In other words, it’s all true except for the stuff I lied about.

Best regards,

Porkpie

Know what I mean? And a good ride it was. And to labour a point, take a look at this:

Cover art that’s got the virgin mentioned in the title and a stash of cash. Pulpy! Crimey! But it turned out to be darned good read. Classic pulp crime of the double-crossing kind with a not-so-typical, yet expected twist-in-the-tail ending. Not to give away the story or play spoiler, but by the end of the second chapter, let me assure, the girl is definitely not a virgin! Though to her credit, she stays vengeful till the very end of the book, in more ways than one. But a virgin, not a chance!

So coming back to the point. Judging these books by the covers alone, they were good. And what lies n between them, even better! Check out the entire Hard Case Crime series and their awesome covers HERE. See what I told you, I can judge a book by its cover. is The Bekku awesome or is The Bekku awesome?! And no, a few paragraphs is not enough time for The Bekku to learn the subtle art of modesty.

Take a look at the complete Hard Case Crime series and their awesome covers here.

Part 2 of Past coupla weeks or more, give or take

And those were some of the books and tv series.....

Part 1 of Past coupla weeks or more, give or take

Well been too busy. As usual. And too lazy to update. As usual. Busy with life, work, short trips, appointment with mr. walker of blues fame, a farewell party or two, etc. etc. but why bore you with details. Actually the more interesting parts are best told in person. So instead The Bekku is taking the easy way out and talking movies, tv and books in the past 2-3 weeks which have contributed to keeping the devil’s workshop out of business for a while. especially, back to the regular average of 2-3/week, so that’s comforting. Well here goes….of what I can remember top of mind….If i don't remember the rest of them, am sure there are more, it's probably because it wasn't worth the bother in first place.

Idiocracy

The title says it all. In a distant future, the morons have taken over the world (but can't really blame you if you think that's the scene right now ). Sample question from IQ test in the future as shown in movie: “If you have a bucket with 5 gallons of water and another bucket with 2 gallons, how many buckets do you have?” You don’t need to be a genius to know this is a must see.

Girl Next Door

Sent my best friend and me scurrying for Elisha Cuthbert pics. Nice-of-age college flick. Smart but boring boy gets a new neighbor – super hot chick who is a porn star. Need I say more?

Knowing

Alex Proyas doesn’t disappoint. Ya, the same guy who gave you Dark City and I, Robot. Interesting twist to the old apocalyptic prophecies and such like yarn. Slow in bits but ultimately worthwhile. Watch maadi. Don’t miss that clever touch at the end and all that it implies, which makes that one scene larger than the story of the movie itself.

Push

Would’ve worked better as a 3 episode TV miniseries. Actually I think it was one – going by the production values and the feel of the film - till they decided to edit it down to movie length. Regular people but with powers hunted down by shady agency. Heroes anyone?

Black Dynamite

If you aren’t a fan of blaxploitation films, you might miss out on the little touches that make this such an awesome spoof-cum-homage such a nice enjoyable film. But you still can enjoy the jive talk, the neat look, the women and old 70s exploitation movies, this one’s for you. Once you get past that niggling feeling that you are watching namma Prabhakar in an afro. Don’t let the poster mislead you, it’s a new movie. See what I said about homage to movies past?

Bitch Slap

More exploitation fun. Could’ve been so much better considering it takes it cues from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And blaxploitation films. Hot chicks, guns, cars guns and lot of skin – all the ingredients are there. But still, missable unless you know who Russ Meyer is and like his stuff (as in now! Not after you do a google search).

Fantastic Mr.Fox

Wes Anderson scores yet again with an amazing stop motion retelling of Roald Dahl’s classic tale. Go watch!

Iron Giant

Very nice animated movie about an Iron Giant (duh!) who crash lands on earth and befriends a small boy and their adventures thereof. For children aged 8-80.

Avataar

Sure you could do with more written on avatar ya? Though must say the sfx ‘n the 3D experience was good fun – both times! If you haven’t seen it already, go watch Pocahontas!!! Or maybe you are waiting for the Director's Cut with the extended alien sex scene. You perv, you.

And at this point The Bekku gets too lazy to type and just dumps the JPGs of TV series watched and Books read and loved. Too much trouble to type and arrange and format stuff. In part 2.

Swine flew then too

The cover to the album Flying Pigs by Floyd the Pink. Look carefully. Swine flew then too. And if that wasn’t enough, this album – with track names mentioning swine and livestock – also inspired George Orwell to write the immortal allegorical novel called Animal Farm.

Yep. You read right. For more information, why not read ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Pink Floyd: theBekku exclusive’?

Unusual Suspect(s)

All sorts of Holmes-ian deductions have been fruitless. Poirot-style moustache twirling even more so. Discrete calls and otherwise Sam Spade-style to possible suspects have been to no avail. It’s going to be almost a month now and i still have yet to figure out who sent me these:

Two great books.
Alan Moore’s Hypothetical Lizard limited edition hardcover
The Thakeray T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Why in the world would anyone want to keep this great gift a secret????
Some day i will know, and on that day, Anonymous Books-Gifter, you will now too that i know, if you didn’t already know i knew or made it b known to me that you were the one....umm....who be you by the way?

Spring Thunder

This man makes me want to learn Malayalam just so i can read him in the original. Agreed, he himself has translated most of his work into English, but knowing as i do the ‘lost in translation’ business that has happened with some of the books in Kannada that i have read in English also, it would be fair to assume that the same has happened with OV Vijayan’s books. As OV (do i dare call them this?) himself said, “...translation is an act of shifting eggs from one nest to another. In the process the yolk and white are separated, and what you have left with is broken shells.” And this from a man who translated his own work into some fabulous English. Who better then?

The reason for this post? After The Hanging and Other Stories by OV Vijayan. Finished it over the course of a packed weekend. From the surreal to the heartbreaking, from allegories to little seeds of thoughts, it was more than just a good read. A good read ensures you enjoy the good while you are reading it. Not after the last page has been turned. A classic like this sticks with you, much after you have finished reading it. It happened with me with Khasakkinte Itihasam, then with Dharmapuranam, and now with After the Hanging...the search is on now for Gurusagaram. If any of you reading this blog regularly (five at the last count) happen to chance upon it, let me know ASAP!

OV Vijayan. This man now firmly occupies the #2 spot in my personal list of ‘Best Indian Writers in English’. If only by virtue of having translated his books himself, and even with that he is leagues ahead of those just out to prove that their vocabulary is as good, if not better than the whites themselves (or that they have a good dictionary/thesaurus). Most are just writing about things we all know and are part of us – making the banal and the commonplace – seem exotic for the white man’s consumption, and the confused rootless generation of today. Not so Vijayan. He wrote, yes, about things here and now and of what could be....but ever in a way so as to give us from here a new perspective, a new way of looking and of thought. Not just through his novels and stories. As an acerbic and unforgiving cartoonist, OV also occupies the #2 spot in my ‘Best Indian Cartoonists’ list.

PS: The #1 spot in the list of ‘Best Indian Writers in English’ was, is and will always be RK Narayan with his ‘Common Man’ brother the #1Indian cartoonist.

PPS: A quick flash back to this, a previous post concerning OV

Quote. Misqoute.

No Van Vogt. No Adam Roberts or Robert J. Sawyer. And where's the Amar Chithra Katha?!!! Contractual obligation page filler it looks like this is.

the sleep of reason produces monsters…..or, au contraire!

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Thus begins William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Wonderful. But from this beginning Blake goes on to 120-odd lines that speak of good and evil, innocence and experience, corruption and clarity. All at once and then some. Contrasting one with the other. Talking of things to the contrary. Ah! William Blake.

A friend of mine liked the first four lines so much she went and read out the rest of the poem (“…after the elation that the first four lines gave me…” in her words). From elation she went to saying, “[I] didn’t expect the poem to leave me feeling disturbed….made me shift in my seat…”. But that was the genius of Blake. To show experience in the light of innocence and look at innocence through the eyes of experience.

For Blake, Innocence and Experience were two states that had to be each given its own due and acknowledged. Putting things forth as they were however disturbing they were. Innocence is not a vacuum, it exists in the world of experience. In Experience there is the vestige and hope of innocence. But while others would tell us one part of the story, hold out only hope, Blake would tell it as it is hoping his readers would go through his larger body of work to get to what he wanted to get at.

So in Blake’s worlds, and in his words, for every Clod which sang….
“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives it ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.”

…there was a Pebble that sang back,
“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.”

In fact the sub-title to Blake’s most-beloved work is “Showing the Two Contrary States of The Human Soul”. But this relationship of Innocence and Experience, this inter-play of these contrary states, is not one of direct, static contrasts, but with ever-shifting perspectives and thoughts and tensions. But what about the Soul? If these be the Contrary States, what about the Soul itself?

The difficulty in trying to get the whole import (if one can ever get to it, or to the best of one’s ability) of Songs of Innocence and Experience is that the States are so intertwined that it is difficult to see the Hope in experience and the fear in Innocence. Later on in his illustrious career, Blake would be more clear….showing the separation of the States from the Individual. The Individual being real and eternal, with the illusory States being temporary conditions through which the Individual would pass. The Body and the States just a ‘clothing for the soul divine’ (see below). That’s what it says in the immortal Gita. With broad strokes, reminds one of the eternal philosophy of Advaita, from which we know that once you that ‘Thou art That’ and cast away the subjective reality of Maya, and uncloak yourself from avidya and agjana, will you realise that ‘Thou art Bhraman’. It’s a long way to go, seemingly impossible. But there’s still the hope. The knowledge. But coming back to Blake, why wait to read the later works, when this same message is there in ‘Auguries of Innocence.’

"Man was made for joy & woe,
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the world we safely go.
Joy & woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the Soul divine…"

But why not then make it apparent from the beginning? There’s a reason. It’s called progression. In Blake’s own words (selectively selected from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

“…As a new heaven is begun…the Eternal Hell revives……
…..
…..Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”

Without Contraries, there is no progression. And another interesting point to note is that Blake refers to ‘a new heaven’ while hell is eternal. Hmmm….is it because Joy is rare and ephemeral, but misery and sorrow is ever present. Is it because Joy and Happiness come in small portions but Misery and Sorrow do not? Like Shakespeare wrote, “When sorrow comes, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”. Or is it because each Joy is Joy, but not every sorrow the same? Leo Tolstoy I think got it right when he started Anna Karenina with this of-quoted line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Well. Too much thought. One can think and think and write and write. Sigh.
Well, one can but barely scratch the surface, knowing that the answer and the explanation may never be within reach. But one can try. And spew it out from his onto his blog, for no particular reason except that one cannot help but think. Keep thinking. Sharks need to keep moving. If they stop, they sink. Similarly I guess if I need to stay afloat, I must keep moving, thinking. Even if it be to no end, to serve no purpose, and for no one but myself. But thinking has its own evils.

But some thoughts get to you. Some thoughts are like monsters. Restless. Eating into you, till you show them the light of day. Let them escape, and set them free from the caverns of your mind. You need to get them out somewhere. You need to grapple with thine demons. And thinking helps it not. Like that other great man in my pantheon realised, ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters…”. At face value, works just fine for me. And thus i guess I am left with some reason to put an end to this post with this image from Goya, called The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters...

“La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.”

Burnt offerings

Don’t be misled. It’s a story masquerading as a work of art. A comic book at heart, and a damn good read throughout. Charles Burns’ Black Hole. Set in suburban Seattle in the 70s, it’s about a bunch of teenagers. It’s about Chris Rhodes, the girl that everyone likes and who sheds her skin periodically, like a snake. It’s about Keith Pearson who loves her, but ends up instead with Eliza, the artist with a tail at the base of her spine. It’s about Rob, who has a mouth on his chest. Then there are all their friends, the normal ones and the not-so-normal ones. But the biggest character of them all in this book, the one under whose shadow we see these teenagers tell us their story is ‘the Bug’ – a disease that spreads through sexual contact and manifests itself in mutations like the ones mentioned above. Mutations and deformities, some subtle and hideable, but sometimes obvious, grotesque and downright repulsive. This story is about the people who have the Bug or are about to and how their lives change. About the ones who lead a squalid existence shunned by normal society because they have the Bug. But read the book, and you realise this story is more than just a parade of sexually transmitted mutations, in a smog of weed smoke.

The art is hypnotic, surreal, creepy, sensual, psychedelic and hallucinatory – sometimes all at the same time. It’s in black and white, but that only serves to add so much more colour to the narrative. The emotions, the reactions, the dreams and the nightmares, deformities, the fear and the loathing. This book captures it all, and throws at you so many questions, most of which the book does not even try to answer. And the ending just heightens this feeling. There may or may not be a moral and a message to this story. The Bug may be a metonym for AIDS or it may be not. It just might be a coming-of-age-story, or the usual teenager’s story about wanting to be yourself and to be popular and to fit in, but then it could be neither. It’s for you to decide if you want to give it an ulterior motive or look at it as just a damn good story. I would suggest, sit back and just enjoy the experience. Get ready to be sucked into the Black Hole.