ssjakira1's Full Review: Clive Barker - Cabal: Nightbreed
The third book on my list (which I actually started reading first and eventually finished last) is Cabal by Clive Barker. I’d wanted to read some Clive Barker for a long time and finally had an excuse to do it. The book actually includes the novella Cabal and then four other short stories, "The Life of Death," "How Spoilers Bleed," "Twilight at the Towers," and "The Last Illusion."
A quick synopsis and my take on each for you:
Cabal - A man named Boone who believes he’s done horrendous things, and in order to seek peace and absolution, he searches for a place called Midian. However, things don’t go as planned and it is believed that Boone is dead. Except his body disappears. Lori, Boone’s girlfriend, is determined to find him and what she finds is much more than she ever bargained for, both in and outside of Midian.
I was waiting to be totally wowed by this story, but I had difficulty getting into the characters since they were essentially tossed at me and I knew nothing else. I kept wondering why Boone was seeing a psychiatrist in the first place and my initial picture of him was totally wrong. I thought was some super badass and was wrong. I thought he had some sort of inner dark power with the way the book summary put it. I was wrong. When I found out how he got his powers, I was disappointed. I also was disappointed in knowing Midian could get trashed by a bunch of hick cops (at least that’s how it sounded). I seem to have completely missed the greatness of this book because I’ve read other rave reviews and just shrug. It was good, entertaining, but my problems getting into the characters made it difficult to really care what happened to them. I was most interested in the killer that showed up. He was freakier than anything inside Midian, both in looks and in mindset.
This was the main meat of the book, and it took me longer than it should have to finish it. Honestly, I’m tired of watching damaged characters struggle with their newly acquired freakishness. I’ve read too many books with characters that do that. In fact, I’ve now just read three books in a row that have characters getting chomped on and thus getting a taste for human blood/flesh. Hmm…I sense a trend…
It’s dark, definitely, and has a lovely amount of gore and mysterious depths filled with bizarre creatures (Midian was awesome and I wanted more of it). It wasn’t bad, it’s just that I expected to have the hair on the back of my neck standing up while reading a Clive Barker book and this didn’t do it, not by a long shot.
The Life of Death - A woman, after a recent operation left her barren and dealing with life and death, finds herself Death’s tool and hopes to meet him in person...
Aaaaah creepy... I didn’t know what I was getting with this one, and there’s very little dialogue going on, but it’s a good tale. It reminded me vaguely of Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of Red Death story, even though it’s very different. In fact, a lot of Barker’s stories did that from time to time, remind me of elements from a Poe story. The little twist at the end I did not see coming, and though I’m bummed someone didn’t die, it was interesting and weird all the same.
How Spoilers Bleed - We all knew forcefully taking land from jungle natives can come back to haunt people, or in this case, kill them.
Voodoo-like magic aimed at you? No thanks. As much as it would suck, the idea behind this and what happened to the characters was great. Short, to the point, with buckets of fresh (or maybe not so fresh?) blood, and with an “Oooh that sucks so bad,” ending.
Twilight at the Towers - When dealing with spies and traitors, something goes horribly wrong. Dead people aren’t dead and something is pounding inside our main character’s skull, trying to get out and be free.
This one threw me a bit. It was a little hard to follow and I felt a little like I was reading Berserk again, what with the whole military-keeping-monsters thing. Not the best story and I think it could have been spruced up a tick or organized better or something. While not necessarily boring or uninteresting, it’s not the best of the bunch.
The Last Illusion - Reminds me of a Jim Butcher-Harry Dresden sort of thing (ironically the main guy is named Harry D’Amour), a detective who is one of the few able to handle the occult. He’s hired to guard the body of a dead magician and even after he’s paid, things around him and the dead man spiral out of hand.
Definitely a good story with action that just keeps coming around every corner and you don’t know where or when. I had a good time reading this one and out of all the stories, even with its flaws, this one was my favorite. There are certain things mentioned or referenced throughout the story that leave you thinking, “Wait, what the hell is that?” or otherwise confused, but there aren’t enough of them to really throw you off. I was more into Harry than any other character and pulled right along with him through this psychotic ride. Bizarre and unexpected, good times.
The book as a whole is an interesting little package of death, mysticism, fangs, and blood. While I didn’t find myself blown away by Clive Barker the way I’d expected (my expectations too high perhaps? But with the way people rave about Barker, I don’t think I was unreasonable), it proved a solid introduction to his style and ideas and on the whole, a pretty positive experience. Er, if you can call gore and scares positive.
For more than two decades, Clive Barker has twisted the worlds of horrific and surrealistic fiction into a terrifying, transcendent genre all his own....More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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