Book Review: CABAL by Clive Barker
Clive Barker’s Cabal is a thrilling celebration of the beautifully monstrous, strange, and grotesque, written in Barker’s trademark breathlessly lyrical style—a style only comparable to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in my opinion—and filled with plenty of scares, adventure, and memorable characters.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of Cabal is how Barker invites the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks when it comes to the ghoulish members of the cemetery-dwelling Nightbreed. He doesn’t so much paint a picture of each of the monsters as he does create an impression of them with his choice of words; one gets the feeling that there are as many interpretations of the characters here as there are readers of the novel. Not only does this impressionistic approach allow readers imaginations to run wild and to take part in the creation of Midian’s monstrous denizens, but it also creates a dream-like atmosphere that permeates every page of the book—which is absolutely perfect when it comes to a horror/dark fantasy novel of this type. This impressionistic approach also applies to Barker’s world-building—he doesn’t ever hit us over the head with it, but merely hints at it, creating a sense of deep history, of deep time, and his use of Biblical allusions also adds to this timeless, mythological depth. So as we follow Boone and Lori into the underground necropolis of Midian and the Nightbreed, relentlessly pursued by the terrifying psychologist Decker, all of this works together to create a sense that we are participants of a nightmarish odyssey into the collective unconscious itself.
I really only had one gripe with Cabal, which is a gripe I find myself having with more and more male writers (Stephen King and Haruki Murakami are other big offenders here): the sex scenes. I don’t mean I have a problem with sex in fiction—I don’t—but I do have a problem if it is a) completely gratuitous, adding nothing to the characters or story, and/or b) written like some random 13-year-old boy’s puerile, masturbatory fantasy, wherein the female characters are little more than objects of titillation and the males hold all the power. Unfortunately, the sex scenes in Cabal meet both of these criteria. Thankfully, there are only two such scenes in Cabal, which make them easy to skip/forget. Still: Male writers, we need to do better.
