Very much this reminded me of Good Omens; it's funny, the characters are excellent, and I laughed out loud a lot during the reading of it. Yep, I really liked it. ( )

This book tended, like the carnival train Cabal rides from town to town, to run off into abandoned sidings leading nowhere. This happened a few times: suddenly we're reading about peripheral characters with no introduction (who is this guy? and why do I care?). Cabal himself gets little introduction, just a sentence of description (which I missed on the first read - I went back and found out he's towheaded and twenty). Why does he mutter German expletives? No idea (I guess he's from Germany). Why is his brother a vampire? No idea, though the book seems to assume we know the backstory. What is Cabal trying to discover with his researches? This last is kept hidden until the very end, when we at last get a look at the man's motivations. The droll, sardonic tone carries the day, fortunately, and the story itself (though it sputters and smokes here and there) is fairly amusing. It is sort of like a funny Jonathan Strange, but not very much. More like the Henghis Hapthorn books by Matthew Hughes: a misanthropic loner who is not much afraid of anything. I'd go with the Hughes books, if you haven't checked them out. Much better than this. ( )

Johannes Cabal needs to collect 100 souls in less than a year to get his own soul back from the Devil. See, he sold it to get insight into necromancy and the ability to understand life and death. Unfortunately, what he thought was a hindrance in his work - his soul - turns out to be needed after all and he's got to get it back, and he's even been given the Devil's carnival to make it happen.

Part Faust, part Something Wicked This Way Comes, with a dash of dark humor, Jonathan Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer is a pretty darned good novel. There's more than a hint of Neil Gaiman here, even some Terry Pratchett, without being derivative. And there's an interesting study of our human nature, how we can lose it in the process of attaining an ultimately unachievable goal, and how we can get it back again. ( )

Although the American Edgar Allan Poe is father of the modern detective story, the ancestry of the thriller is surely English, born to the Gothic novelists Mrs Radcliffe and Horace Walpole?

And for many readers the British still do it Best, mixing humour, provocation and good writing into a tale like Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, set in a world very like our own but in which Necromancers are recognized, and feared.

Johannes sold his soul to the devil but now he wants it back and so enters into a wager with Satan, involving a diabolical carnival and the harvesting of human souls: to achieve his target, he enlists the help of his brother, a humane vampire.

Pretty witty, thoroughly thrilling but not even faintly frightening, this intelligently written book gives a new spin to the Faust fable: small wonder the author is already writing a sequel. ( )

We’ve all done things to advance our careers that we later regret, but Johannes Cabal has screwed himself royally. He sold his soul to Satan in order to further progress his studies in necromancy, but it turns out that the lack of a soul is seriously cramping his research. So Johannes crashes Hell and demands his soul back from the Infernal One, who agrees to give it up if Cabal acquires one hundred human souls to replace it. Oh, and since the Devil’s such a nice guy he’ll toss in a special carnival to help. After a quick stop in a musty graveyard to recruit the assistance of Horst Cabal, Johannes’ charming brother (and vampire!), the carnival begins trawling the countryside to damn the wicked and the gullible and save Johannes’ soul.



The peeks into the world of this carnival-from-Hell were fascinating. Hideous freak shows, occult rides, a cursed midway…a dark carnival is a wonderful place to set to set a story, and author Jonathan Howard creates a creepy setting that I wish he'd spent more time exploring. We see how Cabal ensnares a few of his souls through the attractions of the Carnival, but it would have been great to see more of the different ways he catches his victims.

Something about the book felt unfinished. There were stories that should have been told, but weren't. For example, what motivated Cabal to get into necromancy in the first place? This is hinted at but never looked at in detail. How did Horst become a vampire? Again, never explained to my satisfaction. There were so many references to previous events that occurred before this novel began that the book reads just like the second volume of a series. In fact, as I read I became so convinced that there was another book I went to Google and spent a few minutes trying to find the title to the book I was certain preceded this one.
Likewise, the ending wraps up so quickly and on such a cliffhangin' note that I will be VERY surprised if a sequel doesn't come out in the next few years. (In fact, in an interview on Amazon Howard announces he just finished Johannes Cabal the Detective.)

Johannes Cabal is one sarcastic and calculating bastard. He's not quite a villain, but he's certainly no hero. Even anti-hero is a hat that doesn't quite fit him. But he's very determined, and his dialogue is quite snappy and sharp. His brother, Horst, is equally delightful and provides a perfect foil for Cabal. But while the characters' personalities are well-developed, their histories are not. I wish more time had been spent discussing their childhood or what Horst did while incarcerated underground.

But as much as I’m whining, I really did enjoy this book. It’s positively entertaining and fun. ( )