Cabal

A book I’d wanted to read for a long time, but it wasn’t until later in life I was able to get it. When I was just on the early stages of my writing career, my now longtime friend, Marty, said he had a spare copy of Cabal laying around and offered to send it to me. Marty was my writing mentor at the time as he’d been writing horror for many years previous, and his work is inspiring. So, knowing I was getting a book in the mail from my mentor, to whom I hadn’t met in person yet,… show more.

Cabal is a terrifying tale of one man on the search for who he believes he really is. He encounters demons and monsters in an underground world. These scary characters are the epitome of things that go bump in the night, haunting dreams and stealing souls. This is a terrifying story that ended up being a movie in the 90s.

This is one from my teenage years, and one of the first examples I read of 'monsters' having more humanity than a lot of humans.

On the surface, it's a good, pacey horror story about an institutionalised man who has been convinced that he's a murderer. But the themes of exclusion and belonging really speak to me, especially as a queer man who lives with anxiety and depression. The authority figures aren't to be trusted. The 'monstrous' is welcoming. The 'unnatural' is natural. Barker’s prose is flat-out gorgeous in places: "They were what the species he'd once belonged to could… show more.