Cabal [Paperback]

Clive Barker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2001

For more than two decades, Clive Barker has twisted the worlds of horrific and surrealistic fiction into a terrifying, transcendent genre all his own. With skillful prose, he enthralls even as he horrifies; with uncanny insight, he disturbs as profoundly as he reveals. Evoking revulsion and admiration, anticipation and dread, Barker's works explore the darkest contradictions of the human condition: our fear of life and our dreams of death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Comprised of a novel and four long stories, this volume is classic Barker, full of lurid, bloody imagery and action involving large-than-life characters. It's great fun and provides plenty of thrills or giggles, depending on how seriously you take it. In the novel, Cabal , Boone, a recovering psychotic, is cleverly manipulated by his psychiatrist, Decker, into believing that he has committed several savage murders. Decker, of course, is the villain, but Boone does not catch on. Considering himself unfit for human society, Boone flees, eventually to come upon Midian, a large crypt inhabited by the Nightbreed, dead souls in shape-changing bodies, neither good nor evil, who turn Boone into one of their own. Of the shorter works, the best written is "The Life of Death," about a woman who becomes enthralled by death and is transformed into a kind of Typhoid Mary. Another, "The Last Illusion," which concerns the fate of a magician's corpse, is full of intriguing moments. First serial to Penthouse; Doubleday Book Club main selection; Literary Guild featured alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

The New York Times Book Review [Cabal] demonstrate[s] why the gleefully gory Mr. Barker is at the top of his genre. Endlessly inventive, he takes familiar themes a step or two farther...dazzling, captivating stuff...

The Washington Post In the hands of a lesser writer this could be just another tale of nightmarish evil...[what] lifts Barker from common craftsman to the rarefied and chancy domain of artist is his profound awareness of the alienation and aloneness of man. And he brings these insights into dramatic focus through the innocence of his monsters...

Elle Simultaneously repels and spellbinds the reader...Literature in the tradition of Poe, Shelley and Hawthorne.

Washingtion Times [Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the furthest reaches of the imagination....His ambition and audacity are unparalleled; we know that we are in the presence of a vision that is genuine, unique, and lasting.

Publishers Weekly The most ambitious dark fantasist of our time.

The Boston Herald Barker's work reads like a cross between Stephen King and...Gabriel García Márquez. He creates a world where our biggest fears appear to be our own dreams.

People Barker's dark, powerful imagination -- and his skill in pacing to keep his stories surprising -- make the horror grisly and effective.

Armistead Maupin [Barker writes] with the easy confidence of a tribal storyteller, and elder who has seen everything and committed most of it to scripture.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Clive Barker is back from yet another excursion into his dark and fertile imagination, bearing sinister fruits of fine horror fantasy.

Locus The premier metaphysicist of contemporary fiction.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Gallery Books (January 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743417321
• ISBN-13: 978-0743417327
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #343,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. He is the worldwide bestselling author of the Books of Blood, and numerous novels including Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Sacrament and Galilee. In addition to his work as a novelist and short story writer he also illustrates, writes, directs and produces for the stage and screen. His films include Hellraiser, Hellbound, Nightbreed and Candyman. Clive lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We are all monsters, March 19, 2001

By 

Stone Junction "The Suburban Hobo" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cabal (Paperback)

Monsters have always played a large part in our collective subconscious. They lurk in shadows, under beds, at the ends of dark alleys. Monsters are always with us, in one form or another. Clive Barker realizes this. And Barker also realizes that sometimes, the monster we don't know is far more preferable than the ones we do.

CABAL is Barker's ode to the monster, not as a fearsome predator that only lives to destroy, but as a misunderstood creature that is alternatively loathed and envied. We despise the monster, because we wish to be one ourselves.

Boone is a young man who is teetering on the brink of insanity. While he has been getting treatment under the watchful guise of Dr. Decker, he is still far from unsure that he is well. And when Decker declaims Boone as a subconscious serial killer, with eleven confirmed victims under his belt, Boone decides that his only option is to find Midian, the place where the monsters play. What Boone discovers is an underworld of loneliness and despair, as the monsters of the world attempt to live their lives in peace, uninterrupted by the insanity of humankind.

Barker has always had a, shall we say, fondness for the darker impulses of man. In his BOOKS OF BLOOD series, and his novels THE HELLBOUND HEART and THE DAMNATION GAME, he presents the readers with individuals who truly live their lives on the edge, daring life, limb, and soul to satisfy their primal yearnings. In Boone, Barker has created another unsatisfied loner who craves acceptance, believing he cannot function in normal society. Barker understands the human heart, and isn't afraid to admit that not all desires are the same. But just because one person's desires may differ from another's, does not necessarily make that person wrong. It's all a matter of persepctive.

Barker plays this need of Boone for a family off his other two main characters, Lori and Decker. Lori, like Boone, also cries out for her desires to be sated. She desires Boone. And in a very touching love story, Lori proceeds to travel the paths of Hell in order to be with him.

Dr. Decker's needs are also front and centre, but his needs are admittedly not of the same vein as Boone and Lori's. Without giving too much away, Decker's needs are far more primal than Boone's, and more insidious in their rationality. Boone wants a family. Decker wants no more families, ever. Decker, rather than the monster-lover Boone, is the real evil, the calm that masks the storm.

But monsters are monsters, first and foremost. Barker is one of the more unusually vivid purveyors of the human condition, and his tale leaps from one grotesque to the next. CABAL contains some truly stomach-turning scenes, which is to Barker's credit. While he sympathizes with the monster, he knows that the monster must be true to itself in order to be complete. Like humankind, a monster must accept what it is in order to survive. And what a monster is, is a monster. And Barker does not shy away from the blood, gore, and vivisections that invariably follow such a creature.

Part of what has always made Barker such an interesting writer is his mixing of the profane with the sacred, his ability to juxtapose the horrible with the holy. In his stories, men find redemption as monsters. The evil are rarely punished, and the innocent cannot be allowed to survive. And somtimes, love can cross the boundary between life and death. CABAL is possibly the closest Barker could ever get to writing a flat-out romance novel. Boone and Lori go through the pits of Hell to be with each other. They travel the battlefield of the final confrontation between man and his demons. In the end, it doesn't matter who the monsters are; we are all monsters. How we come to accept it is what makes us human.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good novel, very good short stories, May 21, 2006

By 

General Zombie (the West) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cabal (Paperback)

Cabal: The titular novel/novella takes up about half of the book, but sadly is the weakest work here. It certainly isn't bad, with some rather cool violence and a great villain in Dekker, but it all seems a little under written. I here that this was originally intended to be part of a trilogy, which perhaps points to the problem: The story seems to have only just set itself up completely when it ends. Still, it's a pretty interesting read with a fairly unusual, original central mythology, even if it doesn't make that much of an impression in the end. And yeah, Barker does occasionally over do it with the emotional, convoluted language here, but I think that's more than made up for by his generally more artful style. Occasionally it does backfire on him, but it's more good than bad.

The Short Stories: The short stories are definitely better than 'Cabal', just with cooler ideas and w/o any of the occasional stylistic excesses that marred that novella. I probably like 'Twilight at the Towers' best, a bizarre espionage/lycanthropy tale. It takes place in cold-war Berlin, and generates a real sense of place and just a generally mysterious, dark mood. 'How Spoilers Bleed' is my second favorite story, which is about a curse placed on a pack of Europeans moving in a native controlled land, after one of them hastily and pointlessly killed a native child. The curse is, in short, that they will be repelled by that which they desire, meaning the land and the jungle itself, and this is taken to gruesome extremes. A very grim, nasty story. 'The Last Illusion' is the weirdest story here, a combination of occult horror and the hard-boiled detective genre, all done in a relatively lighthearted, humorous manner. Not quite like anything else I've read, but very effective. 'The Life of Death' is probably the weakest of the stories, but I still like it a lot. It's largely a character study, about a woman who has a hysterectomy and whose life shortly thereafter takes a strange, horrific turn as a deathly plague is unleashed on the city. (London? I think so, can't quite recall.) I don't want to give away any more specifics, suffice to say it's an effective tale.

Yeah, I'm done. This is a good collection.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Barker Classic, April 25, 2004

By 

Mary "Red Hybrid" (Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cabal (Paperback)

This is a great fantasy novel from Barker (It is NOT one of his horror stories). The book draws you in with the great character protrayals. The ending was a little weak and I felt like he left it open for a sequel, which hasn't appeared yet. But all-in-all, if you liked Weaveworld or Imajica, you will like Cabal also.