a_cubed | Books – Johannes Cabal the Fear Institute

The third Johannes Cabal novel takes us into yet another genre. This time Howard plunges into Lovecraftian territory and Cabal enters the Dreamlands and encounters Nyarlothotep. There’s a subplot including ghouls which is supposed to be a twisty ending type of thing but fell quite flat to me. In fact, the whole thing fell rather flat. There’s much better work out there in the Cthulhu Mythos, and indeed I felt moves to dive back into re-reading one of the better ones after this. Howard may well continue with this series, but I don’t think I’ll bother. I may even get rid of these as they weren’t dreadful but I don’t think I’ll really ever want to read them again. I don’t object to having spent the time to read them, but there’s better stuff out there for the future.

On a final note, I also don’t like the way the title works. The first two are descriptive phrases for Johannes Cabal, whereas this one is formatted with Johannes Cabal as the series name and the Fear Institute as the book title. Inconsistency. Ugh.

Current Mood: (thoughtful)

thoughtful