Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Author: Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Humour
Pages: 304 in hardcover edition
How I found it: Amazon recommendation

What it's about: Johannes Cabal is a scientist who sold his soul to Satan in order to gain the powers of necromancy. Unfortunately, he's discovered that being soulless in detrimental to his experiments and he wants it back. He makes a wager with Satan that he can get 100 people to sign over their souls in one year. If he wins, he gets his soul back, if not, he dies. With help from his vampire brother and Satan's power, Cabal starts a traveling carnival and goes from town to town looking for prospective souls.

What I thought of the book, spoiler-free: I started off really enjoying the book, especially its early humour, but in the end I found it unsatisfying. Too much of the action centered around seemingly random things getting in Cabal's way and none of them really stuck around long enough to have much baring on the story as a whole. Cabal as a character was interesting, but not fleshed out enough. Ditto for his brother and the carnival folk were just props for the plot or repeating jokes. The charm of the book wore off quickly. The last 30% of the book was quite a good little arc, but it wasn't preceded by much foreshadowing and it went too quickly for my taste. The humour was hit and miss, and feel like Howard should have either gone all the way with the humour or dropped it entirely.The book felt more like a loose thread of plot with a bunch of stuff thrown at it, but very little sticks. The book just didn't work as a package.

Notes from the Inner Writer:Unfortunately, this book had a lot of examples of what not to do. Many ideas and plots are risen, but then dropped entirely, or concluded with a single line of exposition. Many of the setbacks Cabal runs into are seemingly random, as they have little setup and are then defeated within the same chapter. One chapter is done as a child's school essay, which was cute at first, but the tone was inconsistent and the dialect was too strong, to the point of being unreadable. I don't have problems with a child being unable to spell, but this kid couldn't spell a single word right and yet understood Freudian ideas enough to reference them. The experiment was unsuccessful in my opinion.

Extra thoughts, with spoilers: Going into more detail about the seemingly random setbacks and lack of follow-through: Satan has a flunky burn down a 5th of the carnival, but instead of the story taking the time to show the fallout and letting Cabal overcome the setback, the story jumps months into the future and suddenly Cabal only needs 2 more souls and there is no mention of how they recovered from the fire. The reader can assume Cabal used more of the Satan power that has previously fixed the carnival, but this isn't a satisfying idea because it removes any sense of tension in the plot. The tension comes only from the question of "can Cabal get the signatures?" Any other setback is fixed with the same magic or is dropped as a plot point by a jump in time.

Similarly, the Rufus Maleficarum plot was pointless in that Cabal gets through the challenge quickly and then kills Rufus. The action takes only about 30 seconds in real time. Then we learn that Cabal takes Rufus' army of the insane into his carnival, signs over their souls and then they aren't mentioned again. The escaped murderers are treated much the same in that we are told there was a prison breakout and then chapters later we're simply told that Cabal took them all and we are expected to care about the one murderer who gets a name and is conveniently associated with the ex-police officer who figures into the finale. It really doesn't work, and in fact took me out of the plot.