The Black Tattoo Book

Jack's best friend Charlie has been sucked into a demon-fighting secret brotherhood and Jack's just along for the ride. Charlie suddenly has super-powers and an attitude to match, while Jack is just the same 14-year-old boy he was yesterday. As the brotherhood begins to disintegrate, a powerful demon named the scourge begins to take over and Jack and Charlie are forced to venture into Hell.

The book began with promise but quickly nose-dived after that. The main bad-guy, The Scourge, (sound's like a nasty illness or a cleaning product, doesn't it?) is a demon. He's your typical liquid darkness, I'm-so-evil-I-want-to-destroy-the-universe kinda guy. The action and story line really drag from about the middle of the book and I just wanted the thing to end. The descriptions were nice and vivid but the story felt tempid and boring, the author too obviously in love with the universe he'd created and wanting to share each and every detail whether it was pertinent to the plot or not.

Speaking of plot, that was rather convuluted too. Let's see we have the kids - Jack & Charlie, the five members of the brotherhood, the order of the scorpion flail, the scourge, a host of lesser demons, the emperor of all hell and a cast of supporting characters. Now toss all into a blender and hit start. There's your plot.

I listened to this story on Audiobook and accidentally mislabeled two of the CDs, so that disks 8 and 9 were not played until after disks 10 and 11. AND I DIDN'T NOTICE! That's how all over the place the plot was and how dang long the scenes take. I never even noticed that two hours of story were missing because they were so bloody irrelevant to the overall story arc.