Like his 2005 masterpiece, Black Hole, Charles Burns’s new graphic novel centres on a group of young people. At its heart are Brian and Jimmy, school friends who grew up making Super 8 horror movies together: homages to old pictures such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers that deployed copious amounts of lipstick, and which they still like to watch even now (the laughter at screenings is tinged with pride, for one of them at least). But while Jimmy is cocky and loud, Brian is quiet and controlling. The film they’re about to shoot when Final Cut begins is, for him, a deadly serious business. If he’s desperate for it to be more convincing than their youthful epics (though it, too, will involve an alien invasion of hideous blobs that resemble throbbing human brains), it’s also a way of coping with his seemingly fragile mental health. Creativity is a portal to sanity.
Art and life, though, are very far apart – and perhaps they don’t mix. Jimmy introduces a new friend into their group, a redhead called Laurie, who is to be the star of the film. Like Brian, she sometimes feels out of it; the struggle to communicate with other people, let alone to be part of a gang, is hard for her as well. But she’s also a kind of kryptonite in context. She is beautiful and her loveliness takes its effect both on Brian and on Tina, another of the group’s members. When they set off, first to a cabin by a beach, and then up into the mountains for filming, the reader knows things are going to get complicated. An atmosphere of anxiety and dread suffuses every colour-saturated frame. Burns has written a story of romantic confusion, but in his hands, betrayal takes several forms. Our minds play tricks on us. If human beings are often a letdown, perhaps art is even worse.
I love everything about this book: the story, the drawings, its way with all things extraterrestrial (the alien pod inside which Laurie must lie on a mountainside as the camera rolls – and rolls – is fashioned by Brian from muslin and Velcro). It’s wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be. Here are crimson, squid-like figures falling from an azure sky; here are delicately monochrome evocations of the B-movies of the past.
But don’t be too seduced by its surfaces, however alluring they may be. Final Cut is richer and deeper than it seems at first, a book to be read and reread. Burns is so sympathetic towards his young characters, so attentive to their muddled, nascent feelings, which here play out against the hugeness of the American outdoors (he has had a lot of fun with his landscapes, his woods and mountains, cold lakes and sandy shores, at once pristine and spectral). His books have always seemed to me to be pretty sinister, even dystopian, in the past. Final Cut, though, is just a bit different, the narrative performing a kind of balancing act, teetering on the edge of an abyss without ever toppling in. I can’t be sure, but I think its author is trying to tell us that the end of a movie, at least if you’re making it yourself, can always be changed.
• Final Cut by Charles Burns is published by Jonathan Cape (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
