Heart-racing literary madness
Matthew Firth
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Tattoo This Madness In: By Daniel Allen Cox (Dusty Owl, 2006, 98 pp)
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Hell-fire debut launched by new Ottawa small press
Daniel Allen Cox's short novel Tattoo This Madness In (Dusty Owl Press) helps restore my faith in Canada's young writers. Cox - along with Chandra Mayor, Joey Comeau and others - isn't happy to fall in line and barf out more soft-around-the-middle fiction palatable for the middle class. Cox et al. are young guns who write like young guns; their fiction is laced with piss and vinegar. Cox, in particular, takes his CanLit cues from bold and inventive writers such as Derek McCormack and Tony Burgess, instead of stodgy farts like Alice Munro. In chapter 2 of the book, the protagonist, Damian Spitz, a teen on the run from Jehovah's Witness brainwashing, cuts loose at a Dead Kennedys concert. It's no fluke that the DKs open with their anthem Chickenshit Conformist from Bedtime for Democracy. Cox picked this song for a reason: It's the theme for the entire book. Damian has rejected his upbringing and refuses to do as his parents have done; he refuses to conform to the stultifying, self-hating doctrines of their religion. It's been stuffed down his gob for too long.
When the Smurfs - of all things - are centred out in a sermon as being pawns of Satan, Damian can't take it any longer. He goes apeshit in Kingdom Hall, lashing out against a church elder and the religion. Thus begins a quest to willingly disfellowship himself. In Jehovah's Witness speak, it's the equivalent to being excommunicated. Damian, after years of denial, decides he will feel rather than think, he will bask
in impulse and sensation and take others along with him for the ride. What follows is a hedonistic, sexually charged, violent romp fuelled by a punk rock soundtrack. Key in the book is that Damian discovers his sexual leanings in his emancipation. He goes from being a teen terrified to masturbate because God will hate him for it, to ass-fucking a fellow ex-Jehovah's Witness on the hood of a car. A wee bit of a radical transformation, but when the fetters of indoctrination come off, they really come off.
Cox's prose style is also key to the book's success. He writes with energy. The story surges from word one. Cox doesn't bog the reader down with insipid metaphors or boring descriptions - his characters' actions forcefully drive the book forward.
Cox lives in Montreal, though the novel is set in Miami. The publisher - Dusty Owl Press - is right here in Ottawa, giving this city a role in pumping fresh blood into the old CanLit heart with Tattoo This Madness In.
