This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
[Disclaimer: I wrote this review approximately a year ago (Jan 23 ’15), around when I first started considering book reviews as material for a potential blog. Everything below remains true, but after a year I’ve forgotten many of the books’ details, so I wouldn’t be able to answer any really specific questions or anything.]
Watch for very mild spoilers; bigger ones will be marked so that you can avoid them.
(Image c/o GoodReads)
Recently I read all four books so far in the Johannes Cabal series by Jonathan L. Howard. Well – admittedly I’d been working on this series since I received the books for Christmas, but I only finished it recently. University kind of kills your ability to choose your own reading material. The series consists so far of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, Johannes Cabal the Detective, Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute, and The Brothers Cabal. I added the books to my wishlist knowing relatively little about them save for a recommendation in the form of a long-time internet acquaintance having discussed them on Tumblr, followed by a skim of the book-back summary listed on Amazon. When I pick out books the process can be as quick and simple as that or as long and terrible as agonizing and waffling on every trip to Chapters over the course of many months…
The books were a lot of fun. The dark humour is right up my alley, and the whole series ranks among the few books that have actually made me laugh out loud. The genre, too, suits my tastes perfectly: something a little fantasy-esque without worrying too much about fitting into one definite category or another, elements of mystery and Lovecraftian horror coming together beautifully. A lot of these aspects are very much tastes that run in my family, and I’ve been pestering all of them to read the series as well – my fifteen-year-old brother powered through all four of them, and I’ve gotten my thirteen-year-old brother and my dad both to read the first one.
While on the whole I certainly recommend the series to anyone who likes this kind of fiction or enjoys black humour and cranky German protagonists, I also have a lot of criticisms as a reader and a writer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the series but it falls victim to many flaws that are common to the genre and indeed to much of fiction at large. A lot of my criticism particularly regards the diversity of the cast and comes from my own position as a minority on a few axes who is interested in seeing more and better representation in media. The series is very male and very white, and the writing itself suffers from other flaws that are masked with humour and wit.
Most prominently in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, character development is extremely slow to get going. I would argue that the two main characters (Johannes and his brother Horst) in fact receive very little development at all in the entire book. Johannes’ main growth, and the saving grace of his character in the run of the series, is his regaining of his soul, which he had previously traded to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge of necromancy. With the return of Johannes’ soul comes something resembling a conscience. While a morally grey character can be a lot of fun, Johannes’ total disregard for the wellbeing of others would quickly have grown tiresome if it had been maintained throughout the entire series. Horst, similarly, develops very little; most of what resembles growth in his character is really just the reader coming to learn more about him. Over the later books Johannes develops just enough to keep him interesting, and in the fourth book Horst’s return and his position even more prominently as a main character allow him further development as well.
Relatedly, the cast at times seems so small it’s almost claustrophobic. In the first book there is a menagerie of characters populating the demonic carnival under Johannes’ management, but none of these characters are much more than two-dimensional figures or change at all over the course of the story. It could be argued that this is because they are demonic golems meant only to run the carnival for a year before disappearing once again, simply filling out the story of the first book, but to my mind that’s all the more reason to do something interesting with them. While I’m opposed to the killing of characters for plot advancement, characters who are already established to have a limited run could have a lot of emotional impact if they’re developed enough for readers to grow attached. The only other significant characters in the first book come in the latter chapters, in the form of a cop (retired cop? I’m losing track) named Frank Barrow and his daughter, Leonie. They have their role to play, and in fact Leonie comes back as part of the small supporting cast of Johannes Cabal the Detective and becomes a much more nuanced and developed character, though still not as much as I’d like to see. That second book also has a handful of other secondary characters, still largely flat but at least more interesting than those in the first. Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute pulls back down to a main cast of four, all men; The Brothers Cabal is where the cast finally becomes large and interesting, and involves more than two women.
On that note: women. Being one myself, I like to see a few of them in my books. In the first installment of this series, the only prominent woman is Leonie Barrow – the only other female character I can think of who wasn’t a one-off figure was a weird rubber lady in the carnival who was there entirely and exclusively to be sexy and seductive (admittedly, not a bad way for something like a carnival to draw an audience). Leonie continues to be the prominent woman in the second book, joined now by a young, spoiled noblewoman named Lady Ninuka. The third book falls away from this completely, the only notable female character being another necromancer by the name of Miss Smith, who is present for all of a single scene. The fourth book, however – that’s a different story.
The Brothers Cabal finally had everything I’d been waiting for from this series, significantly including women out the wazoo. Horst finds himself allied (and maybe a little bit in love) with a badass spy named Alisha. They’re working against an evil organization led by the mysterious Red Queen, whose staff includes a necromancer (well, necromantrix, according to Johannes) named Lady Misericorde. Of the secret organizations who show up to help the Dee Society, for whom Alisha works, there are two operated entirely by women: the Daughters of Hecate and the Sisters of Medea. And, my very favourite of all: amongst Johannes’ and Horst’s new allies there is an entire flying circus’ worth of amazing, gender-role-defying, well-developed lesbians. I want to run away from home and join them.
The flying circus is headed by a woman named Virginia Montgomery, arguably the best-developed female character in the whole series. While I don’t think any of the four books pass the Bechdel test at any point (alas), you could almost make a case that Ginny Montgomery passes a Mako Mori test. While her arc does support that of Johannes and Horst, in that she becomes allied with them and supports their main cause, you could argue that she does it out of a desire to protect the women in her circus and to protect the world at large. Not an airtight case, but I did say almost. Regardless, she’s a strong character who looks out for her friends and isn’t afraid to make tough choices. She also has a few moments of wonderfully clever thinking, and does on one occasion get to singlehandedly save the day (or at least, she makes a fantastic play in battle without which everyone would certainly have died). She’s one of my favourite characters in the series by a long shot. As a side note, Alisha also comes close to a Mako Mori test pass – but again, it’s far from an airtight case since her role as a fighter for good in the Dee Society is somewhat subsumed into the Cabal brothers’ fight against their own enemies.
(Big spoiler alert for this paragraph!) One thing about The Brothers Cabal that did disappoint me, and deeply so, was the fridging of Alisha right at the end. I couldn’t believe we’d established such a wonderful, tough, smart, interesting lady only to have her die, breaking Horst’s heart. Of course. It had been well established by that point how Horst felt about her, so she had to die, right? For the manpain emotional impact. And the way it’s handled made it that much worse. For you to understand, we have to backpedal a bit to the inciting force of the whole story, and of Johannes Cabal’s necromantic lifestyle: while the narrator takes their time dropping the clues, the reader eventually comes to understand that Johannes is pursuing necromancy and the cure for death itself because of the death of the woman he loved. Her body lays perfectly preserved in a secret basement lab in his home, waiting for him to find the solution that will bring her back. So what is Johannes’ reaction to Alisha’s death? He offers to Horst the chance to preserve her as well, so that she too can be resurrected when Johannes cracks the perfect formula. Horst hesitates, since he doesn’t know if Alisha would want that, but eventually Johannes convinces him. The absolute worst part of all this is: we have no idea if Alisha returned Horst’s feelings. I pick up on fictional romances fast – I knew chapters before it was suggested that Horst and Alisha were going to end up a Thing one way or another – but I scoured the book and couldn’t find a single thing to indicate whether she had any feelings for Horst whatsoever. And yet, here we are, fridging her for the advancement of a male character’s plot, promising to bring her back to life so they can be together, not knowing if she’d have any interest in that at all. Fridging in combination with a massive case of removing a female character’s agency and independence – and all after setting her up as highly independent, and clever, and capable. It breaks my heart. (End spoilers!)
Aside from gender, I do have a few other concerns about representation in the series. As I mentioned earlier, it’s super white, and I can only think of one character who was definitely described as otherwise: one of the women in the flying circus, Mink, is described as Asian and later specifies that she’s Korean-American. Again, I’ve been reading these books over time since December, so it’s possible I’m missing something, but I’m nearly certain that every other character – certainly every other protagonist or supporting protagonist – has been distinctly white. Mink, while a badass, is little more than a supporting character in her own right. In addition to race, I have some worries about LGBTQ+ representation. To be honest I don’t expect much from any book that is marketed as an LGBT book because we just aren’t there with our literature yet, but having mentioned that the flying circus is all lesbians, I should elaborate. They’re all definitely lesbian-coded, and one character even says that they’re lesbians – but that character is a relatively conservative older man who is scandalized the instant he realizes they’ve encountered ladies who wear pants and smoke. The narrator never actually backs this up, nor shows any evidence of any of them, say, being in relationships with one another. They’re all masculine women, strong-willed and trouser-wearing and gun-toting and so on, and one does at one point deliver a scathing anecdote about being hit on by a man. But that’s about it. If I’m remembering the scene correctly, there’s even a moment at which Johannes wonders if one of them might be flirting with him, though he’s not enough of a people person to really be sure. I like to believe they’re all lesbians, because that’s amazing and I love it, but as both a queer woman and a writer myself, I have to say: back yourself up. It’s not good representation if it’s only mentioned once and then implied a bit. We don’t have enough lesbians in our books, and certainly not in our genre books, so by god, if you’re going to write lesbians, make them explicitly lesbians. Especially if you’ve made no bones about implicit sex (and frankly, more than implicit boner-pokes) in other scenes within the same damn book.
The last thing I wanted to touch on goes back to the actual writing of the books more than their contents: the plot. As I mentioned earlier, the humour often masks the flaws of the writing, and if the first book hadn’t been so damn funny I wouldn’t have been nearly as inclined to keep going. The plot of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer is pretty straightforward, in that one thing comes after another in a very linear fashion and there are almost no truly interesting twists until a clever little thing Johannes does at the very end (it involves tricking the Devil, and it’s pretty good). The second book gets a little more complex, as it must, since it’s largely a mystery and Johannes is required to unwind a long and somewhat complicated plot in order to solve a murder and return to the root of the problem. The third book is, if you ask me, the peak of the series so far in terms of plot; it twists back in on itself delightfully and weaves in and out of its own gaps. Towards the end it got so complex for a while that I thought the author was pulling a Steven Moffat on us and just trying to make it look clever by way of being too damn complicated for the readers to even notice its flaws, but thankfully it wrapped itself up beautifully. I was deeply impressed by the way it all came together, especially after I thought I’d had it all worked out. (I was doubly impressed when my brother finished the book and admitted he didn’t see what was really happening any sooner than I had – he always figures things out before me, so I was quite pleased that this one had eluded him.) The plot of the fourth book is strong as well, finally bringing together threads of the first three stories to create something more closely resembling an overarching plot than the more episodic first three books had done. The transition from the third to the fourth book was particularly compelling, and I felt the need to go straight from one to the next, which is always a good sign. And considering how much I was enjoying other aspects of the story, it was good to see the plot and the writing in general grow stronger as the series went on.
On a whole, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the series and look forward to seeing where it goes from here. The characters and the plot have both strengthened significantly over the course of the four existing books, and I hope they will continue to do so and perhaps at least start to redeem the series from the particularly large flaw I explored in my spoilery paragraph up there. I have high hopes for the books now that I’ve seen the rate of growth, and I’m not planning to let Howard off easy. I’ll be watching for future installments and hopefully, if the university gods are willing, I’ll actually have the time to read them.