To Hell and back

Philip Ardagh finds that the familiar plot of Sam Enthoven’s The Black Tattoo can still get under his skin

The Black Tattoo by Sam Enthoven 488pp, Doubleday, £12.99

The Black Tattoo is fantasy horror: all demons and monsters, meetings with the Devil, and the like. I can’t claim this to be a genre with which I’m particularly familiar, but I did watch the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This alone qualifies me to say that The Black Tattoo doesn’t have the most original of plots.

In the TV series, Buffy is a young, female martial-arts whirlwind, trained and supported by an adult, Rupert Giles, and a ragbag assortment of apparent amateurs out to save the world from what comes from the Hellmouth and lies beyond. They eventually encounter a seemingly far more professional bunch called the Initiative - a body of black-clad soldiers with hi-tech equipment - who seriously underestimate Buffy and the gang’s competence, and their pivotal role in saving the universe.

Like Buffy, The Black Tattoo is - among other things - a mix of fantasy horror, martial arts, comedy and (young) teenage angst. Unlike Buffy, when not in Hell itself, the story is set in London rather than California. And the born-to-fight-the-demons kick-ass girl isn’t the central character. This honour goes to Jack and Charles in fairly equal measure.

Jack is the anchor: the voice of reason. His friend Charlie, bitter at his parents’ separation, is a different matter. He is taken over by the Scourge, the baddest demon of them all, which uses the boy’s body as a vessel, spreading its tentacles of evil all over him, like a giant black tattoo under the skin. It channels the boy’s impotent rage to its own evil ends.

There are echoes of Terry Pratchett within these pages too. The portal to Hell, for example, can be found in a pub, and God (going by the name of "Godfrey") runs the library in Hell; both ideas that would sit happily in Discworld (incumbent librarian permitting). In fact, the time in Hell isn’t nearly as terrifying as the events set on Earth. In London, the pain is real, with lasting scars, both physical and mental. And "Hell", in this instance, isn’t quite the place of the dead so familiar in many belief systems. (The author has some amusing takes on religion, the who-created-the-creator dilemma, and the motivation of some of the mythical players.)

The juggling act between humour and horror is a tricky one: take your eye off the ball for too long, and all credibility can end up on the floor. Sam Enthoven gets away with it. What he may lack in originality of plot, he makes up for in sheer freshness and enthusiasm. He’s clearly loving telling this story - there are some pleasing twists - and his energy creeps into the words on every page. I’ll be very interested to read a book in which he applies his undeniable talents to something a little more off the beaten track. He’s been to Hell and back. Perhaps now he should try something a little more challenging.

· Philip Ardagh’s Final Curtain, the third and final of The Further Adventures of Eddie Dickens, is published by Faber