β Scribed by Clive Barker
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Comprised of a novel and four long stories, this volume is classic Barker, full of lurid, bloody imagery and action involving large-than-life characters. It's great fun and provides plenty of thrills or giggles, depending on how seriously you take it. In the novel, Cabal , Boone, a recovering psychotic, is cleverly manipulated by his psychiatrist, Decker, into believing that he has committed several savage murders. Decker, of course, is the villain, but Boone does not catch on. Considering himself unfit for human society, Boone flees, eventually to come upon Midian, a large crypt inhabited by the Nightbreed, dead souls in shape-changing bodies, neither good nor evil, who turn Boone into one of their own. Of the shorter works, the best written is "The Life of Death," about a woman who becomes enthralled by death and is transformed into a kind of Typhoid Mary. Another, "The Last Illusion," which concerns the fate of a magician's corpse, is full of intriguing moments. First serial to Penthouse; Doubleday Book Club main selection; Literary Guild featured alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review [Cabal] demonstrate[s] why the gleefully gory Mr. Barker is at the top of his genre. Endlessly inventive, he takes familiar themes a step or two farther...dazzling, captivating stuff...
The Washington Post In the hands of a lesser writer this could be just another tale of nightmarish evil...[what] lifts Barker from common craftsman to the rarefied and chancy domain of artist is his profound awareness of the alienation and aloneness of man. And he brings these insights into dramatic focus through the innocence of his monsters...
Elle Simultaneously repels and spellbinds the reader...Literature in the tradition of Poe, Shelley and Hawthorne.
Washingtion Times [Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the furthest reaches of the imagination....His ambition and audacity are unparalleled; we know that we are in the presence of a vision that is genuine, unique, and lasting.
Publishers Weekly The most ambitious dark fantasist of our time.
The Boston Herald Barker's work reads like a cross between Stephen King and...Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez. He creates a world where our biggest fears appear to be our own dreams.
People Barker's dark, powerful imagination -- and his skill in pacing to keep his stories surprising -- make the horror grisly and effective.
Armistead Maupin [Barker writes] with the easy confidence of a tribal storyteller, and elder who has seen everything and committed most of it to scripture.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Clive Barker is back from yet another excursion into his dark and fertile imagination, bearing sinister fruits of fine horror fantasy.
Locus The premier metaphysicist of contemporary fiction.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Cabal is the story of Boone, a tortured soul haunted by the conviction that he has committed atrocious crimes. In a necropolis in the wilds of Canada, he seeks refuge and finds the last great creatures of the world - the shape-shifters known as the Nightbreed. They are possessed of unearthly powers-
When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell a hundred and fifty feet to his death in the chapel at St. Peter's, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn't easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silence
In **Cabal**, master crime writer Michael Dibdin plunges us into a murky world of church spies, secret societies, cover-ups, and mistaken identities. An apparent suicide in the Vatican may in fact have been a murder conducted by a centuries-old cabal within The Knights of Columbus. A discovery amon
The Cabal (Book 14 in the McGarvey series) (2010) In Washington, CIA operative Todd Van Buren meets with a Washington Post investigative reporter who has uncovered strong evidence that a powerful lobbyist has formed a shadowy group called the Friday Club, a cabal whose members include high-
### From Publishers Weekly Hagberg's hard-hitting 14th Kirk McGarvey thriller picks up several plot threads from The Expediter, the previous book featuring the former CIA director. When Kirk's son-in-law, CIA agent Todd Van Buren, meets his college friend and Washington Post reporter, Josh Givens,