“Johannes Cabal the Necromancer” takes part of its inspiration from the Faust tale. Man makes a deal with the devil, man decides he doesn’t like the deal, man tries to renegotiate, against a formidable foe. As a plot device, it’s well-tried. But Jonathan L. Howard makes the premise fresh and quite funny in his debut novel.
Johannes Cabal, as a necromancer, has made a career of dealing with death through magic. It’s a career that’s given him interesting powers in hell. It is within his abilities to re-animate the dead and, as he tells one uncooperative soul, “raise you up from this place, put your cankerous soul into something that will do as a body, and then make you wish you were dead all over again. Repeatedly.”
The cankerous soul to whom he speaks is Arthur Trubshaw, hell’s gatekeeper, “who’d lived a life of bureaucratic exactitude as a clerk in a dusty town in the dusty Old West.” His “life of licentious proceduralism was brought to an abrupt end when he was shot to death during a robbery at the bank. He did not die heroically: not unless one considers demanding a receipt from bandits as being in some sense praiseworthy.”
Trubshaw is but one of the finely defined characters Johannes encounters on his quest. He’s come to hell to regain his soul. He’d thought it wasn’t needed. He was wrong. So he walks in, all bluster and demand, and finally is taken to Satan, seated on his throne, a throne that is “only a throne by dint of its vast scale; otherwise, it was simply a big stone chair on the end of a rocky peninsula that extended into the center of a lake of boiling lava. All in all, it was less of an audience, and more of a fireside chat.”
Satan, initially, is unwilling to budge. A deal is, after all, a deal. But Johannes offers to wager and Satan proposes one he finds acceptable: He’ll return Johannes’s soul if Johannes can collect 100 souls to replace it. He has one year. If Johannes cannot live up to his end of the bargain, well, he forfeits both his life and his soul. Satan, a generous soul — well, not exactly, but one who is always looking to make things more interesting — gives Johannes the means to meet the challenge. Johannes will become the proprietor of the Carnival of Discord.
Johannes, caught between brimstone and sulphur and the desire for his soul, reluctantly agrees. He finds the seeds of the carnival in an old train on an abandoned rail siding. He kills, and then re-animates a pair of would-be criminals, Dennis and Denzil, and leaves them with another of hell’s creations — Bones — to bring the carnival to life.
While the carnival is being brought to what passes for life, Johannes heads to the Grimpen Burial ground, certainly one of the grimmest resting places imaginable. He goes into a crypt, one he’d securely locked eight years earlier, to make another deal. This one is with a member of the undead who, it would seem, would have few reasons to do Johannes any favors. But they find common interests, and Johannes has his managing partner.
At first, it’s just fun and games as the carnival travels the English countryside. Johannes finds plenty of low-hanging fruit in the souls of the greedy and the criminal. It’s not difficult, it seems, to tempt the souls that are already damned. It’s so easy, in fact, that Johannes puts some simple rules in place. No children, certainly; they are too easy to manipulate. No fooling with the honest.
But Satan, seeing the easy success, isn’t willing to be so handily beaten. To make the contest more interesting, he throws up some roadblocks. It will come down not only to the final day of the allotted year, but also the final hour.
Some wonderful ideas underlie “Johannes Cabal the Necromancer.” In addition to the Faustian parallels, Howard tips his hat, in his Acknowledgements at the end of the novel, to Ray Bradbury and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” It’s a work that he says made him wonder, “Where would an evil carnival come from, anyway?” He’s come up with one possibility, one that could literally be described as hellish, and certainly one spiced with a deliciously cynical sense of humor.
The result is more funny than frightening, and in that sense it’s a major departure from Bradbury. This is the spot-on work of a talented writer. For all the sly humor, it would not do to ignore the skill in pacing and character that make “Johannes Cabal the Necromancer” work. It does so because it’s built on people and relationships, and the plot twists that grow from them.
This novel is over too soon. One can only hope that Howard is hard at work on a second one, and that it will be at least half as good.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
Fiction
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
, by Jonathan L. Howard, $25
