Customer Reviews

Cabal

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The scariest thing about this book is it's believability. I'm not talking about the idea of monsters that live in a hidden city, but the sheer inhumanity of the human characters.

Think about it. We had the Inquisition, World War Two and countless other examples of the destruction of anyone deemed different.

Well written and thoughtful in a chaotically poetic way that only the Master Clive can produce, this book gets the full treatment as far as I'm concerned.

This is the first C.Barker book I've read and it still hold a dear place in my heart. The author creates a dark world, where good and evil is slightly different. The creatures of the night live beside us: the werewolf, the vampire, and the bogeyman. And they are an entirely different community, with their own laws, customs and lore. And they also have their enemies, who, although human in form, hide a monstrous soul.

In the dark underworld of the 'Nightbreed', we follow the heroin in her search of her dead lover, who proves to be not as dead after all. Together they defend the hidden clan from their pursuers, fulfilling an old Messianic prophecy.

I just wish Clive Barker would write a sequel to this excellent tale.

The strage thing is this: Nightbreed is one of my favorite films of all-time and definetly my favorite Clive Barker flick, but Cabal, which Nightbreed was based on, is nowhere near my favorite Barker novel. Why is that? Well...for one thing, it's too compacted, more novella than novel. Secondly, there seemed to be elements missing that the movie captured better. The movie better than the book? Are you mad? It's true, on that rare one in a hundred chance, the movie is far superior to the book. Still, Cabal is not bad, it's just not my favorite. Clive Barker knows how to freak us out with stuff we've never even imagined imagining, stuff that would turn us schitzo if we ever encountered it in reality. That's Clive's gift. Cabal just misses slightly. Four other stories accompany Cabal: The Life Of Death, How Spoilers Bleed, Twilight At The Towers & The Last Illusion. Of the four, I particularly enjoyed How Spoilers Bleed: The natives have a clever way of dealing with intruders bent on destroying their homeland. The Life Of Death: A woman, fascinated with death, becomes a regular Typhoid Mary as she spreads death wherever she goes. The Last Illusion is the basis for Lords Of Illusion. Interesting.

Dig it!

Clive Barker is the greatest author in the Horror genre simply because of his technique. He weaves and creates a complete world for the reader to step into and experience the words he writes. I felt like I was standing in that seemingly abandoned town of Midian, waiting for those "monsters" to come take us where Boone felt he belonged. I felt every emotion on those pages. Thank you, again, Clive Barker, for a wonderful read.

The book was good, albeit short. The movie Nightbreed is what got me to read it in the first place. This book definitely deserves a spot on your shelf.

Cabal: The anthology starts off with this novel from Clive Barker. In the remote town of Midian, there is a race of the undead, similar to vampires, and yet different; the sun kills them, they feed on human meat. They also have strange powers, where they can metamorphose into flesh-hungry beats with astounding strength.

The min character, Boone, "thinks" he has committed an uncountable number of murders and goes to Midian, where he feels he will fit in. There he is set-up, the murders are blamed on his without question, and he is shot and killed. Except, for the trap fell, he was bitten by one of the Nightbreed, becoming one of them.

The time is now at hand. The Breed have been in hiding for too long, and Boone now knows where the Breed reside. En force they will come to wipe them out, but the Breed have other intentions in mind. Led by Boone, they will combat the humans and fight for their right to survive.

Cabal was made into a movie, under the title Nightbreed. The story is one of Barker's short novels, only 195 pages long, but like his other works, it is a masterpiece in itself, reaching out and titillating the human psyche with its supernatural hands.

"The Life of Death": A church from the seventeenth century is being demolished, while onlookers wish otherwise. In the church is a crypt, but within are not a collection of organized bodies, but piles of them, tossed in without concern, and they appear to have suffered from some disease. Now this disease has been released into the open; the problem is nobody knows it exists.

"How Spoilers Bleed": Locke has "bought" a piece of land in the jungle of Brazil, but the Indians who have lived on this land for centuries do not agree. What I the white man's greedy answer? To kill them all off with disease, but the Indians also have a disease of their own kind to give to the white man. It is a disease that causes the skin to split and bleed upon touching any surface. The death is most painful and unstoppable.

"Twilight at the Towers": A member of the KGB wishes to be one no longer. He wants to disappear into the democratic world, with the help of the British Security Service, in return for trade secrets. There are also the inhuman experiments the KGB has been performing, creating their very own beasts.

"The Last Illusion": The illusionist has had enough of the crowds and the life of trickery. He has staged his last illusion, one in which he will disappear forever. The wife of the illusionist hires a detective to find out what happened to him. The detective, Harry D'Amour, goes on a great adventure in trying to find the master illusionist. Along he way he will see sights that are not humanly possible, and feats that defy the wildest imagination. "The Last Illusion" was made into a movie, under the title Lord of Illusions, starring Scott Bakula.

Originally published on October 8th 2001 ©Alex C. Telander.

Originally published in the Long Beach Union.

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A young man named Boone, who is suffering from an unspecified mental illness. Although this is not serious enough to institutionalize him, he is nonetheless seeing a psychiatrist named Decker.

To his horror, Boone is informed by Decker during one session that he, Boone, is responsible for the brutal mutilation murders of eleven people that have terrorized the city recently. Boone is informed that he does not recall these horrors because his mind has blanked them out of his consciousness. Before he loses all hope, Boone begins to believe salvation may lie in a place called Midian, a semi-mythical city that offers sanctuary to monsters -- both the human kind and otherwise. He hurridly sets off to seek Midian without realizing the full truth of the insidious events that lead him to such a decision
A very exciting read,I would definitely recommend it...enjoy...Nigel.