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.


Good. But not awesome. Clive's written better ones.   July 27, 2000
 8 out of 11 found this review helpful

Cabal was the first Clive Barker novel I've read, but it didn't struck me as something amazing. I thought it was good, but nothing to get all crazy about. Just recently I've decided to give it another shot and I've picked up Weaveworld -- and WOW. So much better! Cabal is worth a read, but if you want a seriously good and intensely imaginative story, pick up Weaveworld. I will definitely keep on reading Barker's novels - what a talent!


Yeccch. Drearily repetitive violence and purple prose.   January 24, 2005
 7 out of 17 found this review helpful

Clive Barker's Cabal contains a novella by the same name, plus a few extra short stories to fill out the page length. I read the novella ("Cabal") and the first of the short stories ("The Life of Death") and didn't bother to finish the rest of the book; you'll see why shortly. By the way, this was my first (and probably last) experience with Clive Barker.

I enjoy creepy stories (I'm a fan of Stephen King and Peter Straub, for example) and fantasies (e.g. Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman) -- including those with a Gothic sensibility, such the Anne Rice novels -- so I was looking forward to reading Clive Barker, who has a reputation of being a master of gothic horror. But judging by "Cabal," I haven't been missing anything.

Yechhh. The novella is a long, pointless exercise in mutilation: a tale of hacked bodies told in hacked prose. I kept hoping that all of the gratuitous descriptions of faces hacked apart with butcher's knives were there to just spice up a story, but it turned out that there wasn't really much of a story to spice up.

Although I can't go into detail without spoiling one of the very few plot points of the book, I'll say that the underground city was an intriguing invention, but never really explored. We get only vague descriptions of the Breed (with a few notable but ultimately disappointing exceptions), whereas we get page after page of loving detail every time Barker wants to describe someone being mutilated.

The characters are shallowly sketched, and rarely rise above being cardboard cut-outs. We never really learn the nature of Boone's character -- his mental problems are alluded to frequently so that we expect that they will hold some key to the meaning of the story, but this promise is never fulfilled. Who is Lori, Boone's former lover? Although she is a central character, we never understand why she loves Boone so much that she is willing risk her life for him. Instead of investing time on the nature of their strange relationship, Barker decides to treat us to an entirely gratuitous (and completely unerotic) scene of Lori masturbating in a hotel room. Yawn. What about Decker? Although Barker's made a small effort to make his villain memorable, we never gain any insight into Decker's history or his personality. Like all the other characters, he acts without motivation or goal, and thus his actions are boring and repetitive.

And while we're on the subject of characters: there's just no excuse for the redneck police chief -- a completely cliched character taken right out of a made-for-TV movie.

Did I mention how awful his writing is? Here's a bit of the character Lori's interior monologue as she meditates on her former lover Boone:

"There were those among her peers who said she'd never have been courted by a man like Boone if he'd been sane, meaning not that his illness made him choose blindly but that a face like his, which inspired such fawning in those susceptible to faces, would have been in the company of like beauty had the mind behind it not been unbalanced."

And after wading through a couple hundred pages of tortured prose like that, the ending turned out to be completely unrewarding, a trite bit of fakery tacked on the end to round out a barely-considered plot full of loose ends.

I know Barker has his die-hard fans, but I'll never count myself among them if "Cabal" is typical of his work. It will probably be a long time -- if ever -- that I give this writer another chance. There are too many other great books out there to waste time on garbage like this.


Beautiful   May 1, 2001
 6 out of 8 found this review helpful

Clive Barker is the greatest author in the Horror genre simply because of his technique. He weaves and creates a complete world for the reader to step into and experience the words he writes. I felt like I was standing in that seemingly abandoned town of Midian, waiting for those "monsters" to come take us where Boone felt he belonged. I felt every emotion on those pages. Thank you, again, Clive Barker, for a wonderful read.


Could Have Been Better: Cabal Rocks Less Than Clive Barker's Usual   March 21, 2006
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

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!