The synopsis provided goes a little something like this:

Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is obsessed with raising the dead. Tormented by a dark and harrowing secret, he travels to the fiery pits of hell to retrieve his soul, long ago sold to the Devil. Satan, incredibly bored and hungry for a challenge, proposes a little wager: Johannes has one year to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will lose his forever. To keep things interesting, he generously throws in a traveling carnival to help Johannes collect on the bargain. With little time to lose, Johannes raises a crew from the dead and enlists his brother, Horst, a charismatic vampire, to be his right-hand man. Once on the road, Johannes and his troupe of reprobates cause mayhem at every stop. But are his tricks enough to beat the Devil at his own game?

This is a horror comedic novel using as its mainstay a very old trope: putting one over Satan. The writing is workmanlike, uninspiring most of the time, but generally the flow of the novel is steady. The main character is one that will be remembered by those who read this novel simply because he stands out in who and what he does. For me he is well rendered and loaded with enough of the milk of human-kindness-turned-sour that makes what he does tinged with so many elements of what it means to be an intensely driven young man all the more loathsome yet empathetic.

The carnival travels from town to town, picking up souls along the way. One year is what Johannes has to collect the souls, and with his carnival of the damned to help him he slowly makes progress. The crux of the novel is the harvesting of souls, unpure and simple. However, it tends to become quotidian (as soon as the sun sets) for Johannes as time is not on his side. As is to be expected Satan plays some dirty tricks in order to make our necromancer's task all the harder. As time dwindles Johannes reconnects with his humanity on rare occasions, but the reality of losing his immortal soul to Satan easily forces him to collect souls belonging to those not destined for the sulfurous pits.

As this novel drew to a close I would have to say that ultimately it boils down to a tale of salvation brought about by the machinations of a Faustian deal. It is a novel full of light touches which, if the imprecations were omitted, could have been written in the last hundred years. A better than average novel which fails to follow through in any meaningful way on its early chapters. A good attempt from this first time novelist. I will be keeping an eye out for more from Jonathan L. Howard.

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