Let’s try to keep things straight. Cabal is a published book by Clive Barker containing the short novel Cabal and four short stories: The Life of Death, How Spoilers Bleed, Twilight at the Towers, and The Last Illusion.
The short novel that shares the name of the book actually takes up a good portion of the book itself. It is described in the inside dust cover of the book as “a new and ferocious high in Barker’s ongoing love affair with the bizarre, the perverse, and the terrifying–it is the story of a young woman willing to cross the borders of the human to be with the man she loves.”
I would describe it as the story of a madman, a scapegoat, and a woman in love. Cabal (the novel) truly anchors Cabal (the book). In less time than most novels, Barker fleshes out the main characters of Boone, Decker, and Lori with more detail than I had expected.
Those characters descend upon small-town Canadian prairie wholesomeness, which gets mixed with the supernatural and otherworldly. It is something that starts as a mystery and quickly turns into a thriller. This is a short novel after all, so it doesn’t have too much time to waver or belabor the point.
It’s also quite a fast read. This story moves at a pace that almost makes it seem shorter than the short stories that accompany it.
Barker’s grasp of the supernatural and surreal, the godly and grotesque, the perverse and preternatural is in top form during this anchor novel. Never before or since have the prairies of Canada been used as the plain milquetoast backdrop for a short horror thriller. The fact that Barker can pack so much worldbuilding and lore into a short novel is reason enough to pick up the book, but the other four short stories are not at all weak by comparison.
Those short stories are also of a wide variety of love in different ways. The Life of Death could be about loving yourself, How Spoilers Bleed for the love of greed, Twilight at the Towers for the love of power, and The Last Illusion for the love of humanity.
While I did enjoy them all, Twilight at the Towers acting as a supernatural Cold War-era spy thriller was absolutely not what I was expecting. Its unexpected nature is why it might be my favorite piece of the entire book, even more so than the novel Cabal.
Having been acquainted with Barker’s novels that lean more towards fantasy before this one has softened me up to his horror. I’ve not been the greatest fan of the horror genre, in any medium, so diving deeper into Barker’s bibliography is my way of trying it out. It’s similar to my recent exploration of Stephen King through “The Eyes of the Dragon.” As an admitted huge fan of Barker’s fantasy novels, Galilee, The Great and Secret Show, Coldheart Canyon, and Imagica, all of which have certain small horror elements, Cabal and the accompanying short stories go further.
I may not be completely warming to horror as a genre for book or film, but I am still enjoying Barker’s works. Horror or fantasy, I’ll ride with Barker. If you like horror, Cabal may be something to look into. If you don’t, perhaps starting with one of the previously mentioned fantasy-aligned Barker books would soften you up.