The Black Tattoo

This book was nothing like what I expected, the protagonists are much younger then you would think and the cover is definitely overly serious when compared to the actual text of the book. Yes the book is an apocolyptic hell will take over the world kind of thing, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. With running jokes like (God)frey, the archivist/librarian being our God and double headed tape worms who argue at every meal over who's the mouth and who's the bum, this book is good for a laugh. Don't expect one of those whiney the world is ending and it's all up to me books, cause this isn't it.

This book isn't at all what I expected. I thought it was going to be all dark and serious. Instead it falls somewhere closer to the writing of Terry Brookes or Douglas Adams (minus the sci-fi). It is funny. Yes, yes, the universe is in danger of being snuffed out in one abortive act of finality and everyone is in danger, but the characters (Jack especially) are still able to recognise the absurdity of the situation and let an exasperated explicative slip. Jack's insistence that most things in his life are just 'typical,' even when everything around him is most assuredly not is an effective running gag that made me laugh more than once.

Granted, he's a pretty useless hero. I'll admit that for much of the book I lent toward agreeing with show more other reviewers who disliked him because of this. Even after hints that he might have finally been given a few extra abilities of his own nothing materialises. He remains totally and utterly normal. But toward the the end I started to suspect this was the point. He is the most powerless individual in all of Hell. He is simply below notice of the movers and shakers of the underworld. But in the end he is also unquestionably the hero. As defenceless as he is (and knows he is) he twice marches into the bowels of Hell to rescues his friends..."and apparently the universe." He willingly offers his life in place of his best friend in order to correct the actions of another and save the world. Such courage is almost superhuman by itself, more so since there is nothing but unassuming backbone to support it.

Esme is just plain awesome. I always love a well-honed warrior and just go gaga over a female one. I suppose I should at least mention Charlie. He's a git. He just is.

I got fairly tired of all of the ridiculous descriptions of the different demons. A whole section of the middle seemed dedicated to this. The story seemed to lag a little, bogged down by one description after another. Similarly there seemed to be a lot of 'great black wings wrapping around them' going on. It seems that one description apparently covers a lot of different sounds. All-in-all, I enjoyed it. show less

I confess, I bought this for the back cover blurb.

('Vomiting bats? I'm sold' Neil Gaiman*

* Neil Gaiman has specifically asked us to point out that he has not actually read The Black Tattoo yet.)

The book gave me *exactly* what the blurb led me to expect - a really enjoyable, fun, ride complete with vomiting bats, demons in the subway under Centre Point, and the poor, abused, old Marquee, perfectly cast as the gateway to hell. (It might help that I'm a Londoner, and this book is a London book)

I only discovered this book by chance. When I was in the library picking up my collection of Garth Nix books, this was on display on the shelf above the Teen section so that the cover was visible and as it's such an eye-catching cover, I was intrigued. I thought the blurb sounded quite promising and so I took it home.

It's written in a very casual style which doesn't always work. Sometimes the lack of proper sentence structure would detract from the story and either bring me out of it or occasionally it would make the reading difficult. Having a story written in a casual tone is all well and good provided the reader doesn't have to re-read parts several times in order to work out what the author is going on about! There was also much use show more made of formatting: demons speech was given in bolded type in a large font size, and towards the end of the book, there were great sections of type in large black font. It was like being shouted at for several minutes and I found reading it quite tiring. Again, it was something that detracted from the story. It seemed to be like set dressing, like the author was making sure that the stage was all nice and pretty so that you didn't realise the actors were dreadful.

The plot was fairly decent and some of it was new but there was so much of it that was copied from other sources that it spoilt it. There were several scenes of supposedly superfast fighting, obviously taken from The Matrix and not in a particularly good style. They were rather done to death in those films and the same went for this book too. The idea of a rift into Hell seemed to be lifted directly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as were possibly a lot of the inhabitants. Locating said rift in an ordinary London pub was obviously taken from Harry Potter. I seemed to spend more time spotting other books plot devices than actually reading new stuff.

There are 4 main characters in this book and I found them all to be really flat and 2 dimensional. I didn't especially care about any of them and found most of them to be quite irritating. Jack was marginally a bit better than the others, more rounded and with a little more to him but that doesn't seem to be saying much.

On the whole, a rather disappointing book which is probably why it took me a good two weeks to read. It was really slow and difficult going, even though the story itself isn't all that taxing. It's very much a book that has so much in it that detracts from reading it: the constant text formatting, the blatant copying of other books and TV programmes, the characters that annoyed me... There are some things in it that are promising but on the whole, it's not a great read. I'd advise trying it only if there's nothing better to read and only repeats on TV. show less

This book was nothing like what I expected, the protagonists are much younger then you would think and the cover is definitely overly serious when compared to the actual text of the book. Yes the book is an apocolyptic hell will take over the world kind of thing, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. With running jokes like (God)frey, the archivist/librarian being our God and double headed tape worms who argue at every meal over who's the mouth and who's the bum, this book is good for a laugh. Don't expect one of those whiney the world is ending and it's all up to me books, cause this isn't it.

This book was nothing like what I expected, the protagonists are much younger then you would think and the cover is definitely overly serious when compared to the actual text of the book. Yes the book is an apocolyptic hell will take over the world kind of thing, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. With running jokes like (God)frey, the archivist/librarian being our God and double headed tape worms who argue at every meal over who's the mouth and who's the bum, this book is good for a laugh. Don't expect one of those whiney the world is ending and it's all up to me books, cause this isn't it.

This book was nothing like what I expected, the protagonists are much younger then you would think and the cover is definitely overly serious when compared to the actual text of the book. Yes the book is an apocolyptic hell will take over the world kind of thing, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. With running jokes like (God)frey, the archivist/librarian being our God and double headed tape worms who argue at every meal over who's the mouth and who's the bum, this book is good for a laugh. Don't expect one of those whiney the world is ending and it's all up to me books, cause this isn't it.