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....
From the creator of Black Hole ("The best graphic novel of the year." —Time; "Burns's masterwork." —The New York Times Book Review), the second part of a new epic masterpiece of graphic horror in brilliant, vivid color.
Doug is a young man with a lot of troubles…the first of which is seemingly his mind. At the beginning of Charles Burns's X'ED OUT, the first volume in a series, he disappears into a rabbit hole that is actually a hole in the wall of his room, and he's guided to it by his long-dead cat, Inky. Something is obviously amiss in Doug's world and in his head, and it's fascinating to see where it all leads.
The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset 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 no turning back.
