"Beasts Made of Night" is set in a dystopian, sci-fi world where aristocrats hire poor youths to cleanse their souls by "eating" their sins. Those sins show up on the sin-eaters' skin in the form of black animal tattoos, which can't be washed off. So the sin-eaters, who have not sinned, are shunned...
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 07:02AM on October 25, 2017