Johannes Cabal the Necromancer - Jonathan L. Howard

The first book in Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal series provides a good introduction to a great character with lots of potential. Not all of it is realised in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, but it still has all the trademark wit and humour in the original comic manner that Howard deals with the material. 

It doesn't quite live up to the Gothic horror expectations that are laid out in the hilarious opening (and closing) sequences where the necromancer Cabal makes an unannounced visit to Hell. Not having completed the exhaustive paperwork and, worse, still living, which is very much against regulations, he proposes a wager with Satan for the return of the soul he willingly parted with in order to further his nefarious researches. Not many come out well from a wager with Satan, but Cabal is a tricky character.

What you can't quite see however is Cabal as the owner and master of ceremonies of a old-fashioned travelling carnival with all its sideshows. It doesn't quite fit with the character somehow. Nonetheless, if you have agreed to obtain contracts for 100 souls for Satan within a year, a travelling carnival train filled with disreputable (undead) characters passing through small towns with plenty of gullible rubes is a fair way to go about it.

Howard manages to find some very amusing situations in this, building up the novel as a series of almost standalone episodes of great invention that establish some of the character of Cabal in this first novel, even if little of it lives up to the bookending brilliance of the encounters with Satan. The real joy of the first Johannes Cabal book is clearly evident throughout, in Howard's brilliant turns of phrase, in moments of hilarious laugh-out-loud asides that he drops in among the very unusual and original situations. It's a sheer delight to read, and a style that is carried over into subsequent books, making them all essential reading.

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