Johannes Cabal Review

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan Howard           Somewhere between Christopher Moore, Neil Gaiman, H P Lovecraft, and the Brothers Grimm lies Jonathan Howard's new novel Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer.  Funny enough to propel the reader through the witty narrative, confident enough to invest a great deal of ethical and emotional weight in its protagonist, eerie enough to add a great creepy, tense sheen to some of its more harrowing passages, Johannes Cabal functions as many different things to many different readers.  At the end of the day, however, it's simply quite enjoyable.       Credit must be given to Howard for the formation of his protagonist.  Johannes Cabal is not a good man.  He is, in point of fact, a bad, bad, bad man.  In years past, he traded his soul to the devil.  He doesn't really seem to miss it, except its absence is interfering with his experiments.  What experiments?  To achieve what?  Well, he is a necromancer.  So it's probably not good.  The book's brilliant opening passages entail Cabal storming the Gates of Hell (quite effectively) to have a nice chat with Satan.  Cabal wants his soul back.  His experiments, you see.  Satan rather likes having Cabal's soul in his possession; more souls, after all, are preferable to less.  So he makes Cabal a proposition.  Secure Satan one hundred souls in a year's time, and Cabal can have his returned to him.  So, yes.  We're rooting for our protagonist to steal people's souls.  With the help of a haunted carnival Satan loans him, and his older brother, recently turned into a vampire (also Cabal's fault).  And when a vampire is the more ethical one in a fraternal pair, we're heading into interesting territory indeed.       Howard's novel moves nimbly through this set-up, with Cabal firing off brilliant world-weary bon-mots, wielding sarcasm as deftly as any of the other (devious) weapons in his arsenal.  As truths about Cabal's past, his future, and his present quietly unfold amongst all the soul-stealing, the tension is deftly ratcheted up, the deadline fast approaching, and it goes into overdrive in a finale that introduces a detective who might - just might - be onto Cabal's scheme, just as Cabal approaches the one line he might not be able to cross.  Combine that with one of the better denouments that I've read in quite a while, and it's a brilliantly fun read.    Much like it's morally ambivalent protagonist, Howard makes the shrewd decision to keep the time period in which the book is set unconstant, unsure.  At times you can be sure you're just before the turn of the century, or earlier; others recall more modern eras, other still less.  Horst, Johannes's brother, seems to have met his fate in a Shelley or Stoker milieu, and a standout scene at an abandoned railway station seems a perfect stand in for England just after a world war.  It's segments like these that raise Johannes Cabal (both the novel, and the man) up to heights rarely scaled by books euqally as funny, underscoring the whole affair in a sense of melancholy, of loss, that floats around Cabal like a cloud; the one trait that gives the novel its surprising emotional depth, and allows both the protagonist and the reader a thin sliver of hope for how the novel might turn out.  After all, Satan should never win, right?   Right?   -Drew