This is one of the oddest books I've ever read. It's chock full of symbolic imagery, the majority of it being sexual in some way (and the majority of that being somehow involved with female sexuality). The story, at the center, is just about teenage kids falling in love and being in pain, etc. The kind of stuff thousands of books have been written about. But there's this weird STD involved that deforms the people who get it into monsters and all this vaguely chthonic artwork that's really interesting. Anyone disturbed by horror movies might be better served avoiding this because some of the illustrations are vivid to the point of nauseating, but the book is really good and worth taking the risk.