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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We are all monsters, March 19, 2001
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good novel, very good short stories, May 21, 2006
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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Could Have Been Better: Cabal Rocks Less Than Clive Barker's Usual, March 21, 2006
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!
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