2013-05-19T01:20:53-07:00 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/ Lussumo Vanilla & Feed Publisher http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8737&Focus=254863#Comment_254863 2010-08-12T20:58:59-07:00 2013-05-19T01:20:53-07:00 46&2 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=999

I'm reading two books, back and forth at the moment. I'm not quite finished with Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal yet, but here's what I think so far: Johannes Cabal: The Detective, intrigued ...

Johannes Cabal: The Detective, intrigued me when I read a couple of reviews which played off the sociopathic nature of the main character, who outwitted the devil and also happens to be a Necromancer. It brought to mind some of the edgier takes on Sherlok Holmes, from Alan Moore's LoEG and our own Warren Ellis' Aetheric Mechanics (please god write more stories with that character you can have my first born) that I've been dying to see actually fleshed out. The reviews also mention a sort of snarky, dark humor in the novel, which is there but hasn't really made me laugh so much as it's made me wonder why I'm not laughing. The story Takes place in an early yet fictional 20th century. The fictional "Mirkavia" (which is, apperently, not very far off from Ruritania) is in a unstable country that seeks to reclaim land taken from them some time ago. Cabal the Necromancer is coerced into reanimating the prematurely demised leader of Mirkavia as a means of fascillitating a power-grab by one Count Marechal, which has some entertaining results.

The majority of the story takes place on an "aeroship", a zeppelin on which a murder takes place, and Cabal's investigative skills are tested as he also becomes the target of the murderer. There's something about the characters that keeps me reading, even though it's hard to see Cabal as calculating when he sometimes gets lost in little mental tangents, and just as hard to see him as sociopathic, or even amoral when he states he only engages in certain activities in order to be anti-social. I can't imagine a sociopath that has to state this in such a straightforward manner. On the upside there seems to be a good deal of thought put into Cabal's particular brand of Necromancy, and Cabal himself, while not what I expected, is still fun character to read.



The second book btw is Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. I've only read one chapter and I'm already fascinated.]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=8737&Focus=254919#Comment_254919 2010-08-13T06:35:45-07:00 2013-05-19T01:20:53-07:00 Contumacy_Singh http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/account.php?u=62

Creatures of Light and Darkness is one of my all-time favorites. Zelazny just lets his imagination go nuts.