The wall Decker had taken five years to build had been brought down in as many minutes, and by its architect. With his skill as a visual storyteller, Barker masterfully conveys emotions, motivations and personalities effortlessly that plays out in HD, scene by scene in your mind. The other four short stories collected with Cabal are also really good, and each is very different from the others.

The hints of 'destiny' as to why Boone is spared death when he steps before a truck are unfulfilled, with Baphomet simply charging the destroyer of Midian with a task to rebuild the Breed's place in the world.Eigerman is only interested in fame and fortune, if it takes the genocide of a town full of strange beings, whose only crime is their weirdness, that is fine by him. The plot of this novella is tight, without a single paragraph that doesn’t contribute to advancing the plot. After a suicide attempt, Boone is taken to a clinic and told by a fellow patient named Narcisse that he knows the location of Midian, a semi-mythical city that welcomes monsters. Mixing legend with reality, the undead with the living, the sane with the insane, Barker takes us on a journey from Calgary to the wilds of Canada, and it is both intriguing and damned right horrific and should not be approached lightly - this is proper horror folks, none of that dampened down jump-scare stuff you get today, but it's also a love story (aren't they all? Lopped heads were raised in triumph, changeling children piked in their cribs, dogs disembowelled to unravel the shape-shifters beneath.

I think that we will perceive the living from the point of view of the dead, we will perceive the natural from the point of view of the unnatural, we will perceive ourselves from the point of view of something other than ourselves - whereas conventionally in horror movies, at least today, you perceive the Other from the place where your head is when you go into the theatre.The draft accelerates the plot, intercutting scenes of Lori's exploration of the Necropolis (finding Babette in distress) with Sheryl's exploration of Midian's streets (finding Decker). Cabal is overflowing with symbolic dualities: life and death, day and night, humans and monsters, sanity and illness, there definitely is something going on there. It's not often I read a book just for the joy of the words, and while this isn't the strongest of his form (I'd probably pick the Hellbound Heart for that), it is evident as you read it. Domingo De Ybarrondo is one of the most beautiful names I've ever heard, and it is written on a gravestone with no information whatsoever. We're not really on the side of the cross-wielding Christians, we're actually on the side of the creatures of darkness.