I didn’t really want to read about a priest: I formally resigned my from-the-cradle membership in the Catholic Church in 2011 over the sex abuse scandals that were then rapidly boiling into the news, via a drunkenly composed letter to the Archbishop of Philadelphia. The publicity materials that came with The Holy Mark said that Anne Rice had loved it, though, so I gave it a whirl—I’ve liked Anne Rice ever since I found out she used to leave long, thoughtful messages for her fans on an answering machine with a publicly listed number. She steered me right. The Holy Mark is a horror novel of the human soul, deeper and more alarming than Stephen King’s haunted cars or any of the kinda-dead ghouls of the airwaves. This book shocked me, entranced me, and made me glad to be a Protestant.
By the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration as a priest, Father Tony has been put out to pasture in rural North Louisiana. He grumps through his pastoral duties, putting on weight and mulling his triple defeat at the hands of the Archbishop of New Orleans and his rich old uncle. They prevented him from pursuing a doctorate; they obstructed his special ministry to the youth of New Orleans; and now they’ve exiled him to a dull and miniscule parish somewhere between oblivion and the Arkansas line.
As Father Tony reflects, we learn that he was destined for, if not doomed to, the priesthood from birth. The crown of his head bears an ambiguous port-wine stain, which is interpreted, cloud-like, by all who see it. Some see a trumpet, others the infinity symbol; but his devout Italian grandmother, desperate for a priest in the family, knows it’s a Eucharistic chalice. This segno sacro—“holy mark,” in plain English—makes Tony his grandmother’s favorite, as does the fact that he’s one of the few people in the family to bother learning Italian so he can understand her.
At 15, already-portly Tony has what he doesn’t understand is a crush on his handsome older cousin, and his knowledge of Italian frustrates a plan by his aunt and uncle to partially disinherit Tony’s mother. Sexually confused and openly disliked by much of his surviving family, he enters the seminary. He balds early and takes great pains to hide his holy mark under a series of toupees. As he moves through his education and into the early years of his priesthood, he continues to admire the purity of teenage boys and, promoted to manager of a home for indigent boys with high potential, believes God has shown him a special way to minister to these lost souls, a method known to the reader by a much darker name.
Author Gregory Alexander never flinches. Many authors, when tasked with showing the inner workings of a depraved mind, either smirk at the audience or throw themselves into cartoon-villain territory, complete with exclamations of “Fool!” and highly specific verbs like “thwart” and “avenge.” Alexander dodges these bullets: Father Tony’s interior monologue is rational (by his standards) and consistent. His crimes are presented matter-of-factly for the simple reason that, for him, they’re not crimes but an unorthodox ministry, a prime example of the Lord working in mysterious ways. Similarly, his paranoia comes not with a twitch, but a sigh: of course his uncle and the archbishop work against him. They’ve always hated him. It escapes him completely that their actions against him are not belated revenge for his foiling of the inheritance plot but, rather, attempts to prevent a scandal and, oh-by-the-way, protect some children.
Alexander has also made Father Tony realistic. Though we know he’s committing among the gravest of sins, he still emerges as a fleshed-out, believable character. The great deformity in his conscience doesn’t obscure his more benign foibles: he eats too much, looks into getting more modern hairpieces, and finds the obligation to perform Mass relatively boring. This is deeply uncomfortable, partly because we’re used to reducing sinners and criminals to two-dimensional goblins and partly because Father Tony is likable. He is world-weary but not quite cynical, secretly irreverent, and a lover of fried foods. There is much about him that the reader can understand … except, of course, for the twisted expression of his “ministry.” This also opens the door to an interesting meditation on sin: is it sin if the mind is too disordered to understand the wrongness of an act? Crime and sin are often roommates, as are madness and evil, but The Holy Mark reminds us that they are not necessarily equivalent.
The Holy Mark won’t be for all readers. As I believe I’ve made clear, it’s a first-person account of a sexually disturbed mind; and some of the ancillary characters make unpleasant, but historically expected, comments about race. (One old nun laments that New Orleans would never again have a white mayor.) For the reader willing to be uncomfortable, however, this novel offers a compelling read, a demonically charismatic central character, and the opportunity to reflect on the complexities of human frailty. Weeks later, the story is still with me, which is the mark of relentless art.
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