NB, by way of recommendation, not caveat: I "read" the audiobook, narrated by Christopher Casenove (Audible.com). His reading is one of the best I've heard among hundreds of audiobooks. I tend not to be swayed in my opinion of a book by the quality or character of the narration, but perhaps this ...
I LOVE the prose and the dry humor in this book. It's definitely a "reader's read," but it's so worth it. Cabal is smart and witty, which makes you almost overlook some of his horrific, self-serving actions. I'm currently reading the second one, and I am missing some of the other characters that ...
Sometimes this book was a tad long winded, but otherwise, it was hilariously evil and quirky. Cabal is an amoral SOB and his disdain for everything that is not his work is really fucking funny. He's that sarcastic friend we all have that breaks the fourth wall and doesn't care about what you thin...
If you’ve read the two previous Johannes Cabal books, you know that Howard is Lemony Snickett for grown ups. The premise this time is that Cabal, a necromancer, is approached by a weird trio who say they’re representing the Fear Institute and intend to engage his services. First of all, a necroma...
Failure. Damnation.Leonie Barrow.First, he worked on his conjuring. The card vanish he’d used to dispose of the extra ticket he’d offered Frank Barrow had been technically correct but an artistic disaster. It would never do. He sat down with a deck of cards in front of a mirror and started vanish...
She rarely gave the slightest impression that she was listening; more than once she had been reading while he supplied the gloss overviews of the vast number of reports that were submitted, analysed, and rendered from mere information into valuable intelligence. He would say that he was wasting h...
To Johannes Cabal, this showed shocking over-familiarity and ill-breeding. Winter as a whole was a trial to him, forcing his attention from his work and to the necessities of running a house as the mercury dropped and the pipes threatened to burst at the first frost. Even when his house – a three...
The locals were moderately excited by this development, and a great milling throng of perhaps eight people gathered at a respectful distance from the train and the row of gaudy entomopters that stood before it along the access road, gleaming and so out of place in the determinedly bucolic setting...
Carter returned to Providence after spending the last few days working in New York, picked the cube up from the Material Sciences laboratory, and took it back to show Lovecraft. They studied it over lunch at the Italian restaurant a two-block walk from the bookstore. “It’s...
Colonising a new planet had given the settlers a long-range perspective on the workings of religion and it all seemed so distant to them here; so irrelevant, so faintly childish. Religions were still studied, though, if only as mythologies, and as a way of understanding some aspects of Ter...
“Madam,” he said, knowing enough to be embarrassed by the asking, “forgive me for being so forward, but might I enquire—and you must feel in no way constrained to answer if you do not wish to do so—might I enquire, are you exothermic or endothermic? Your metabolism, that is?” The lady in question...