Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Darkly Gripping Comic Fantasy
Beyond the wall of sleep lies the Dreamlands, a world formed by dreams, but not a dream itself. For countless millennia, it has been explored only by those with a certain detachment from mundane reality, its strange seas navigated and its vast mountains climbed by philosophers, mystics, and poets. Well, those halcyon days are over, beatniks.
Johannes Cabal is coming.
Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is employed by the mysterious Fear Institute to lead an expedition into the Dreamlands, an expedition to hunt and destroy the dread Phobic Animus, the font of terrors, the very source of all the world's fear. They will enter exotic lands where magic is common and monsters abound. Cabal will encounter witches, vile abominations, and far too many zebras.
And, when they finally come close to their goal, Cabal will have to face his own nightmares. But for a man who communes easily with devils and the dead, surely there is nothing left to fear. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having determined that the greatest impediment to human progress is fear, Messrs. Bose, Corde, and Shadrach of the Fear Institute seek the assistance of Johannes Cabal (first seen in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer and Johannes Cabal the Detective) in hunting down and eliminating the very spirit of fear, the Phobic Animus itself. They will seek it in the Dreamlands first written of by H.P. Lovecraft, where they must confront ghouls, terrifying wooden automata, devious slavers, and hungry cats, and Cabal's own arrogance will be sorely tested by the god Nyarlathotep. Howard's affectionate, witty homage to Lovecraft's dream stories, complete with early-20th-century setting and language, is an enjoyably macabre comic adventure, and his antihero Cabal is, for all his overweening self-confidence, an engaging protagonist whose heart is not quite as hard as he would like to pretend. Howard capably handles the confusing and mutable world of the Dreamlands and several intriguing twists in the plot, and the concluding cliffhanger makes it plain that he is far from finished with his sardonic wizard.
