D.P.'s CBRIII Review #3 - Johannes Cabal: Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

Okay, I'm in a piss-poor angry fuck-the-world mood today, but I'm nothing if not dedicated so here's your goddamn book review, everyone.  The book is Johannes Cabal: Necromancer.  This book is weirder than shit.  It's weirder than Steve Buscemi skull-fucking you right in the brain hole.  Perhaps I'm exaggerating.

Basic plot is such: Johannes Cabal is a necromancer (hope I'm not spoiling anything yet).  Long ago, he sold his soul to Satan in order to continue conducting some kind of experiments.  But now he needs his soul back.  So he goes down to Hell (the first stage of which consists of lots and lots of paperwork) to visit Satan and be all "Hey yo, I need my soul back" and Satan is all "LOL, no" and Johannes is all like "You're a dick, dude."

So Satan agrees to make a wager with him.  Johannes has one year to get 100 people to sign their souls over to Satan.  If he can get 100 people to do so in one year, he'll give Johannes his soul back.  So Johannes goes back out into the world and employees the help of his zombie brother (told you, it's weird) and a bunch of other half dead zombie creatures and they put together a travelling carnival (The Cabal Bros. Carnival) to traverse the land, visiting small towns, setting up rides, fun, and games for one night and recruiting souls in each town.

That's essentially the plot.  He's racing against the clock to gather 100 souls in time to meet the deadline so he can get his soul back.  I won't ruin the ending, but clusterfuckery reigns supreme and the ending is pretty interesting and the reason Cabal wants his soul back is finally revealed at the end in quite the touching way, which leaves the book open for a sequel (which happened: Johannes Cabal: The Detective is on bookshelves now).

I enjoyed it.  It dragged slightly in a few places, but it was unique enough to keep my interest and darkly funny at times.  I'll be checking out the sequel.  I give it 7.5 Goddammit Fuck Todays out of a possible 10 GFTs.  Go read.