Audiobook Review – Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (Johannes Cabal, Book 1) by Jonathan L. Howard, Narrated by Christopher Cazenove (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Steampunk/Historical Fantasy
Length: 10 hours and 48 minutes
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: August 17, 2009
ASIN: B002LTZYNG
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Johannes Cabal series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 4/5 stars
“A charmingly gothic, fiendishly funny Faustian tale about a brilliant scientist who makes a deal with the Devil, twice.
Johannes Cabal sold his soul years ago in order to learn the laws of necromancy. Now he wants it back. Amused and slightly bored, Satan proposes a little wager: Johannes has to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will be damned forever. This time for real. Accepting the bargain, Jonathan is given one calendar year and a traveling carnival to complete his task. With little time to waste, Johannes raises a motley crew from the dead and enlists his brother, Horst, a charismatic vampire to help him run his nefarious road show, resulting in mayhem at every turn.”
Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Johannes Cabal series. There are five books in this series. I got this on audiobook from Audible.com.
Audiobook Quality (4/5): The audiobook was well done and pleasant to listen to. I would recommend listening to this on audiobook if you love audiobooks.
Thoughts: This is my second time reading this book. I originally reviewed an ARC of this back in 2010 and really loved it. I always wanted to go back and read the rest of the series. When I saw that most of the books (all but the first two) were available through Audible Plus I thought this would be a great opportunity to go back and do just that…starting with a re-read of the first book.
I have to be honest, although I had forgotten a lot of the story, I just didn’t find this as compelling of a read as I did 11 years ago. I gave it 5 stars on my first read and this time I would give it 4 stars. Pretty sure this is just because this isn’t as unique of a story to me as it was when I read it way back then.
The story tends to wander a bit and the characters are fairly unlikable throughout. I do like the dark humor here and enjoy some of the twists and turns at the end. After finishing this book though I wasn’t dying to read more about these characters. There is a cliffhanger at the end but I just kind of didn’t care. I am wondering now if that’s why I never came back to this series in the first place all those years ago. Although, I enjoyed rereading this in the end, I didn’t care enough about the story or characters to really want to read more. The writing is a bit stilted at times and a bit hard to engage with and I think that is part of the issue as well.
My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed re-reading this book and found it humorous and entertaining. However, portions of the book were slow and I didn’t really love any of the characters here. I don’t plan on continuing with this series. It is very good though and those who enjoy dark historical fantasy with a lot of sardonic humor may really love this series. Re-reading this for me just reminded me of how I found this entertaining but not engrossing or compelling.
