The Black Tattoo

In THE BLACK TATTOO, Sam Enthoven’s created an adventure novel of anti-theology for young adults, excising all the white hats in favor of a panoply of demonic dictators and gladiators which will appeal to fans of grotesquerie and fight scenes.

The protagonists are fourteen year-old friends: handsome, adroit Charlie and scrawny, risk-averse Jack. Jack, who’s perpetually disappointed, is recognizing a new dissatisfaction in Charlie, whose father has just abandoned him and his mother to set up house with a girlfriend. Distraught after an angry visit with his dad, Charlie races to follow an enigmatic, black-clad stranger with Jack on his heels, dissuading the whole way. Soon, this stranger will be dead, but not before introducing the boys to the alluring teen fighting phenomenon, Esme, and her dad, Raymond, who live in an abandoned theater covered with hand-painted butterflies and devote themselves to preparing to battle dark forces. On his way beyond the mortal coil, the stranger will also infect or gift Charlie, depending upon one’s viewpoint, with a black tattoo that writhes in resonance with the awesome new power within him. Esme and Raymond represent the last members of an ancient order who guard the world from The Scourge, a creature of darkness imprisoned on Earth centuries ago. But recently, The Scourge escaped, and it, along with the rest of characters and the story, will move on to Hell.

Enthoven’s Hell is another place, not a status. On the back of a sleeping cosmic dragon, it’s no afterlife, but an alternate dimension, like a gooier and more lethal Detroit with the physics of an Escher print. People, or the many bizarre species of planetary beings that pass for people, do die here and often. In that vein, God turns out to be just another resident, a tatty and doddering old irrelevance named Godfrey, another mirror within a mirror trick, since the name Godfrey means “peace of God,” causing God here to be named after a subsidiary of himself. The quality of one’s character is much less important here than one’s image management and kung fu skills. In this context, Charlie becomes intoxicated with his commanding new capacities and the resulting adoration of the mob, and lurches toward what puny earthlings, at least, would consider a bad decision. Meanwhile Esme and Jack, in divergent ways, will try to stop him with the occasional help and hindrance of a different secret human sect, the numbered Sons of the Scorpion Flail, more suited to being Keystone Cops than inter-dimensional operatives. Enthoven’s strengths are his action sequences, his grasp of the ridiculous, and the invention of a fantastically gross kaleidoscope of characters and settings in which fans of Hieronymus Bosch will discover a garden of distinctly unearthly delights.

For me there were appealing hints of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer with perverse, funny touches of Douglas Adams, as in unremarkable Jack’s resigned characterization of every horrible misfortune as “typical” like a young, already defeated Arthur Dent. Our world is depicted as more or less a hobby tank of sea monkeys that survived to every superior being’s (which is to say everyone’s) surprise, though not through any fervent advocacy or aid from Godfrey who feels, instead, a distracted fondness. I found myself wishing that the author had further embraced the comic absurdity of his marvelous creations, and detached the setting and characters from the weighted labels of Hell and demons and God. However, since he obviously and deliberately leaves them coupled, he must pay the freight.

Weakening the plot’s movement, after scrapping traditional underpinnings of good and evil and dismantling the rationales for virtue in favor of pure cunning and force, there’s a dearth of legitimate motivations for the protagonists to pursue the “right” story goals as we’re still intended to understand them, such as saving Charlie from himself. Why bother? Just to stay alive? Without revealing too much, even staying alive in Hell requires adopting a cannibalistic addiction. It’s wild and weird to read about, but it’s not so great. Certainly, parents who will be disturbed by this kind of content ought to be informed in advance, especially since the book will be marketed toward 10 year-olds at the low end of the age range. Nothing in the cover art or in the blurbs or materials I saw indicates at all the razing and reimagining of traditional religious concepts that’s within, and if that’s not revised by publication, I don’t consider it quite fair play by Penguin Razorbill. For parents and other book-buyers who won’t be bothered by the quasi-religious reframing, while I do think kids of 10 may well enjoy the disgusting creations and nifty bladework against exotic, non-human opponents, due to the overarching nihilism and moral incoherence, I’d probably save it for teens.

Esme has a warrior’s strength, but she never explains herself as following any code of honor that might substitute for the herein pointless notion of virtue. No matter what happens, she doesn’t doubt, she executes, literally. Out for revenge, she’s positively hollow except for her grim, inexplicable resolve. Self-sacrifice is demonstrated on her behalf, sort of, but the bones of the many dead are quickly forgotten and ground to powder beneath everyone’s heels. Jack’s tetchy concern for narcissistic, stupid Charlie seems misplaced at best, and nobility and loyalty are most warmly demonstrated by a cuddly (and repellant) utility creature called a Chinj, although a compelling reason for this Chinj’s sycophantic obsession with Jack also remains unelaborated.

Eventually, and it could've come quicker for me, Enthoven makes the ticking-clock apocalyptic climax about the destruction of all existence. That’s probably wise, because frankly, from Hell’s and even the humans’ perspective, earth isn’t much worth defending save for familiarity’s sake. "But she’s MY drunken sod of a mum!" The tangled, mad-cap resolution will come down to humorous nincompoopery and to debating with the epically jaded. Though I read it as substantially belittling the lives it nonetheless saved, I still found THE BLACK TATTOO an enjoyably farcical, inventive thrill ride through a battlefield of gruesomes, even if philosophically the trip's from Why Bother? to Is That All There Is?