In a famous call-and-response blues tune, Blind Willie Johnson asks, “Well, who’s that writin’?” And the answer is his song’s title, along with that of Irish music journalist Peter Murphy’s contemporary first-person coming-of-age novel.

“John the Revelator” is John of Patmos, the putative author of the Bible’s Book of Revelations, among Western culture’s most enigmatic and apocalyptic texts. Johnson’s 1930 song was covered by later artists as disparate as Depeche Mode, the Blues Brothers, and Beck, just as images and language of Revelations are laced through numerous works of art. “John the Revelator” itself feels like a cover song, a stroll over familiar literary territory. Nevertheless, the novel is entertaining and a solid addition to the library shelf admittedly groaning under coming-of-age stories.

Like Jumping Jack Flash, John the narrator was born in a storm, according to the book’s first sentence, as he begins his chronological testimony about growing up in fictional Kilcody, a small Irish town near the Irish Sea.

“I knew you were a boy,” John’s mother tells him. “Heartburn. Sure sign of a man in your life.” The symbolic resonances of the narrator’s birth and his name, and that sardonic observation style almost calling for a rim shot, hang over the story from this first sentence.

The plot’s armature is four principal characters: John; his chain-smoking Bible-quoting oracular unwed mother Lily; James Carboy, the town’s hip new kid who helps John learn about the wider world and about life; and Mrs. Nagle, an odd, possibly sinister neighbor who insinuates herself into John’s life from boyhood to the story’s end.

Murphy also weaves in the stereotypical Irish gift for lilting, colorful conversation; Catholicism; small-town life; music, subtly; adolescence and its very real moral choices and dilemmas; and the stereotypical flip side of the garrulous Irish public character, which William Butler Yeats called the Celtic twilight — a moody occult shadow on the soul creeping from a pre-Christian world of spirit and malign forces and general existential angst.

John the narrator is the product of a love affair between his mother Lily and a musician for whom she ran away from home. “You were named after an old hymn he taught me,” she tells John. What song? “John the Revelator.”

Making a record in an isolated farmhouse, John’s father got increasingly strange and paranoid, feverishly rooting his apocalyptic vision in the Bible and nuclear holocaust, and finally getting so unbalanced that pregnant Lily left and returned home to Kilcody.

“I took what money there was and sneaked out the door . . . Then I saw a man coming up the road and half his face was covered in a big purple rash. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I asked him was it from the fallout, and he said, ‘No, love, I’ve had it my whole life, it’s just a birthmark.’ ”

In Kilcody, her parents’ door shuts in her face. Mrs. Nagle, an overly solicitous neighbor, helps Lily find a place to live and have her baby.

This is not a subtle book. The author reminds readers of John’s occult connections repeatedly, most pointedly via a handful of interpolated italic dreams and visions. The book’s climactic physical plot point, the local Catholic church’s vandalization by John and his sensei-in-cool James Carboy, occurs in what seems a hallucinatory fit involving supernatural creatures and bodily fluids and synaesthetic visions. “What in the hell got into you?’ [James] sounded angry. Not just angry. Scared . . . ‘You went berserk,’ he said. ‘In the church. What’s wrong with you?’ ”

“John the Revelator” seems to want to be a conventional growing-up tale featuring a sympathetic, compelling protagonist affectionately drawn in an environment ripe with opportunity for riffing and scenes, but then the author gins up an overlay of mysticism that comes from nowhere and adds up to nothing. One recurring back story involves newspaper reports about a Nigerian immigrant whose disappearance in Kilcody is linked to “obeah” and folk magic. And John apparently surprises Mrs. Nagle one night performing what seems to be a mystical ritual in the bathroom, as John’s mother mysteriously weakens and wastes away near the book’s end. However, Mrs. Nagle as voudun priestess (and the other bits) is not supported by any narrative underpinning.

John’s opening into mystical channeler is an “unearned” outcome in the parlance of writing workshops, or at least one with negligible stakes. Murphy seemed unable to decide what kind of book he wanted to make, often a problem with first novels.

Lily’s mysterious final unexplainable wasting death, requiring John to become parent to his parent, embodies a conventional plot device allowing the author to show John’s arc toward maturity (and sympathy). This plot strand, however, twins with John’s betrayal of his friend James, in the fallout from the church vandalization. It is James who goes to jail (a boy’s home) for the incident — branded a snitch — because of information that John, not James, gave the police. And it is James and John’s mother who provide the book’s second-half gravity, while John spends his time brooding and feeling guilty and sparring with Mrs. Nagle, caring for him at his mother’s request.

James himself learns about “love” via an older woman, and a significant younger one, and the African immigrant shows up and turns out to be part of a mundane romantic triangle that explains his going to ground. John’s mother dies, painlessly but bafflingly. However, in a kind of happy ending, the hip James gets out of the boys home and travels to Morocco, hooks up with an American rapper and apparently finds a forum for his coolness in composing song lyrics, a fact conveyed via news reports.

After turning 16, John’s poignant end is apparently independence and incipient adulthood. James would perhaps have been a more interesting protagonist.

While charming and accomplished, “John the Revelator” resembles other contemporary (and older) Irish and Scottish novels. Murphy does deserve the attention he has received, but this book is not exactly a revelation.

Ed Taylor teaches English and writing at Canisius College and Buffalo State College.

John the Revelator

By Peter Murphy

Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt

254 pages, $25