I assume at least a couple of you have heard of the Cliver Barker film Nightbreed, starring Craig Sheffer and David Cronenberg, based on his book Cabal.

This novella -- though a pleasant read touched by Barker's incredible talent to make prose always seem fresh and pleasing to the eye without ever tiring you -- is actually quite a huge disappointment, and I do not think a lot of care was put into it (I even noticed a couple of clearly unintentional punctuation errors throughout).

Barker's characterization, as with most of his work, is honestly not the best you'll find, even within the Horror genre. And Cabal is no exception to this criticism because, even though the two protagonists are well-developed compared to most of his other works, the novella has a sloppy story structure, introducing characters out of the blue, and revealing important subplots in the middle of the climax without any forewarning.

Barker even dropped some characters completely from the story, never to mention them again or to mention them only vaguely (Peloquin and Lylesburg never get proper closure) and even left the story on a cliffhanger, which seems to contradict Barker's idea that "some stories are simply meant to be shorter."

In my humble opinion, this novella doesn't fit that bill in any way, shape, or form and should have been a full-length novel. I was eager to read the book after watching Nightbreed, which had faults of its own as well, but neither piece of work felt complete. Barker refers to Nightbreed as "a broken classic" because of the whole hour of footage Fox cut out of it and I agree with him, but I also believe that that's a label which would fit the book as well. The book has answers that the film does not, and film has answers that  the book does not. As a result, neither version feels "whole."

Barker's descriptive prose though, as I've already mentioned, was top-notch as always, which seems to come naturally for him.

All in all, it was pleasant to read, but disheartening to think of what it could have been. Barker used this exact same plot in his novel Weaveworld and executed it masterfully...not the case with Cabal.

On the brighter side, the novella comes with four of Barker's short stories unrelated to Cabal, and most of them are pretty good.

6/10

--Julio