(Cover rights to current holder. The book doesn’t name the artist)
THE BROTHERS CABAL by Jonathan L. Howard really didn’t work for me. So mostly what I learned from this one (which since I’m behind again, is my November Writers Learning entry) was cautionary tales.
The Story: Picking up (I gather) from the previous book in the series, this opens with the necromancer Jonathan Cabal dying, only to be saved by his vampire brother Horst. Horst then devotes much of the rest of the book to his experiences dealing with a sinister fellowship of dark occultists, before he and Jonathan go out and kick their butts.
WHAT I LEARNED: Well for one thing, I hate it when I can’t figure out the setting. Howard’s style is faux-Victorian, but the book didn’t seem Victorian, and when there’s no date, I assume the story is contemporary. And then it has airplanes and trucks, making it definitely contemporary … except Prussia’s still around. And when some kind of weird helicopter shows up, I assume it’s steampunk alt.history. But I could be wrong.
At my last reading of the intro to Southern Discomfort, someone said I didn’t need to set the specific date because it was obviously early 1970s from context. Reading Brothers Cabal makes me confident I was right: Location and time is not something I want readers to have to guess at.
Humor is Tricky. Early on in the book, Howard makes a footnote to the effect that if you don’t understand Cabal’s reference to the Dreamlands, either read Lovecraft or the earlier series novels—preferably the series, because Lovecraft doesn’t need royalties. Which didn’t work for me because it didn’t seem to fit with the humor tone in the rest of the book. Though that didn’t really work for me either. It seemed to focus mostly on how Horst isn’t really a dark creature of the night and feels slightly ridiculous being called a Lord of the Dead, and jokes about uncomfortably supernatural beings go back a long way.
And when humor falls flat, the result is usually less satisfying than when drama falls flat. Like the old theater line goes, dying is easy—comedy is hard.
Style is Tricky Too. Howard’s ornate, somewhat Victorian style is presumably meant to be a big selling point for his work. It certainly grabs me more than his plot or his characters. And again, it didn’t really work for me—certainly not enough to make up for plot and characters not grabbing me.
That’s a subjective assessment, but that’s the thing about style—if you’re relying on that to hook readers and it doesn’t, you’re out of luck. I like Lovecraft’s style despite its flaws, but plenty of people just can’t stomach it. I’ve read several interviews where the writer says anyone who’s described as a stylist is really a bad writer, because if he was good, nobody would notice the style (“Style should be invisible!” is an absolute for some writers).
I like style (not necessarily a specific style) but it needs a story under it. Lord Dunsany is an excellent storyteller, as is Raymond Chandler and they’re both great stylists. Howard? Not so much on the story. I might have liked it better if he focused on the necromancer from the start, as that’s a fresher field to plow than vampires. But I don’t feel inclined to read one of the earlier volumes to find out.
seStyle ranges from writers who use as little of it as possible (“style should be invisible” is a maxim for some) to storytellers with tremendous style such as Chandler or Dunsany.
