This page is for the characters found in the Johannes Cabal series, organized by the order in which they appeared. Beware, though - Spoilers for the entire series are unmarked!
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Johannes Cabal
Johannes Cabal
The man himself, anti-hero and borderline Villain Protagonist, Cabal is a young-ish German-born, England-raised man who had always been bright, and rarely personable. The second-favorite of his parents, Cabal's life wasn't too bad as he planned to be a doctor, and was able to find love. Then tragedy struck and his love drowned. Cabal preserved her in an chemical solution and resolved to find a way to conquer death. Tragedy continued to strike, but it rarely deters Johannes — even if it should.- Anti-Hero: Cabal is at his worst in the first novel, getting worse to the point where he is briefly in full villainy mode. He softens in later stories though he is never what most people would call nice or good.
- The Barnum: Shares this duty with his brother Horst in the first novel, as he has to run a carnival designed to trick people out of their souls, and not just their money. He's not really very good at it though he delivers a fairly good if blatantly mean-spirited speech when Horst convinces him to be a barker for one night.
- Brutal Honesty: Cabal is not a bad liar, but most of the time he can't be bothered and has no problem saying harsh upsetting things to or about people.
- Character Development: Of the Defrosting Ice Queen variety. Goes from Villain Protagonist in the first book to someone capable of caring about other people and making friends in the fifth.
- Deadpan Snarker: Cabal has an acid tongue, a sarcastic streak and is not afraid of insulting anyone from local politicians, dangerous noblemen, and even incredibly powerful beings like Satan and Nyarlathotep.
- Determinator: Cabal is the kind of man who simply will not stop because he believes he can not. This is somewhat of a Deconstruction as Cabal's refusal to quit is both a strength and a flaw — if he had given up sooner in life a lot of people, himself included would have been spared a lot of pain.
- Hand Cannon: His preferred weapon of choice is a Webley .577, his reasoning being that if you're going to use a gun you might as well use the biggest one you can get your hands on, so as to minimize the chances of your target surviving or coming back to life.
- Iconic Item: His blue-tinted spectacles, which he always carries with him. Whenever he's seen from an outsider's POV, that's one of the first things anyone notices.
- Kick the Dog: In the last few chapters of Necromancer he gets a few. First he entraps a woman into thinking she killed her baby in order to get her free from prison and reunited with her still-living baby-in return for her signing her soul away. Then he attempts to blackmail Horst into doing what he says-which turns them fully against each other. In the second example, he was semi-possessed by a demon, but in the first he was just desperate.
- Moral Pragmatist: This is the core of Cabal's character — to restore his love to life, to conquer death itself, he'll do almost anything at all. Frank Barrow grapples with this when trying to analyze Cabal in the first novel, thinking that Cabal is both, in his own way, a very moral man, as well as evil.
- Never My Fault: When he's at the depths of his villainy and his threatening of Frank Barrow leads to his daughter signing her soul over (something Cabal didn't want even at that desperate hour) he blames Frank for being so stubborn-Frank is naturally shocked by this selfish view.
- Pet the Dog: At the end of Necromancer Cabal goes to hell and gives a poor soul there an eraser (taken from Layla the Latex Lady's corpse) — something incredibly valued to the pencil-writing pre-damned.
- Phrase Catcher: The first time his name is mentioned in every novel, "a necromancer of some little infamy" is added right afterwards.
- The Soulless: Cabal is without his soul for most of the first novel— getting it back from Satan is the impetus of the plot. It doesn't really change his personality, but it does make him combustible in holy areas and disrupts his scientific experiments.
- Took a Level in Kindness: As the stories go on, Cabal gets noticeably nicer — if only slightly. His conscience mostly just annoys him
- Tragic Hero: Cabal is ultimately a very sad man who got stuck on the third stage of dealing with death-Bargaining. He absolutely refuses to give up the hope that he can reverse his beloved's death-and he's been this way for nearly all of his adult life. He would be a more traditional Byronic Hero, but he lacks any sort of passion.
Horst Cabal
Horst Cabal
It is a telling fact that the vampire in the family is the nicer of the two brothers. Horst Cabal was the kind of guy who life was mode for — he had looks, brains (although no real ambition), and a way with people-everything he tried at seem to come easy to him.Then his brother enlisted him to enter the supposedly haunted Druin crypt. Johannes locked him in there when the sunset an hour before they expected and the crypt's vampire awoke. Eventually killing the undead woman, Horst was left alone for eight years until Johannes freed him, and was enlisted to help his brother run the Carnival of Discord. Trying to be Cabal's moral compass lead to disappointment for both men, and Horst took a walk in the sun.
At the end of The Fear Institute Horst is relieved to be 'alive' again, the circumstances of his resurrection being dealt with in The Brothers Cabal.
- Action Hero: Horst is not a fighter by nature, but The Brothers Cabal sees him engage in more action and adventure than his time with the Carnival, and he proves himself to be quite adept at it.
- Aloof Big Brother: He's always been better than Johannes at pretty much everything other than academics, and it's clear he was their parents' favourite child, so no wonder this is how Johannes sees him. They repair their relationship after Horst comes back from the dead.
- Back from the Dead: Commits suicide by sunlight at the end of Necromancer, but is then brought back to life at the start of The Brothers Cabal.
- Become a Real Boy: Johannes gets Horst to join him in running the carnival by promising to find a cure for his vampirism. When the brothers meet again, Horst is still eager to be human again, and Johannes repeats the promise. However, by The Fall, Horst begins to wonder whether his newfound abilities and usefulness aren't worth the craving for blood and aversion to sunlight. At the end of the series, he gets to get the best of both.
- Big Brother Instinct: Despite all the bad blood between them, he agrees to help Johannes get his soul back, and later, after his death and resurrection, grows very protective of him.
- The Casanova: In life, at least (Horst feels affection as a vampire for women, but thinks that he might be asexual now), Horst was always the sort to engage in casual sex. One incident recalled in passing sees him have sex with an entire woman's lacrosse team.
- Dhampir: He drinks his vial of the Fountain of Youth powder to save himself from the rising sun. However, because he was thinking about how he'll miss the vampiric powers, the powder turns him into a hybrid creature, giving him the ability to walk in the sunlight again and eat human food (two things he missed the most about being a human) while letting him retain his powers (though diminished in strength).
- The Empath: His superhuman senses, along with his natural talent for reading people, give him an excellent sense of what other people are feeling.
- Fangs Are Evil: Averted, as while Horst has fangs they're not described as being very obvious, and certainly not a mark of him being evil — though some people who don't know he's Horst Cabal, nice guy, and just know him as 'that English vampire' misjudge him.
- Foil: Naturally the two very-different Cabal brothers are foils for one another.
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Horst being a vampire affected his soul slightly, but he's still a very nice guy. The Brothers Cabal delves into this in-depth, with an evil little voice — a mental metaphor on Horst's part that contains his more typical monster-impulses that he nearly always manages to resist.
- Genki Guy: He has seemingly boundless reserves of energy. When he's leading the vampires againt Ninuka in The Fall, his underlings note that he seems more full of life than the actual living.
- Hypnotic Eyes: Horst has mesmerizing vampire powers, and can use them to give commands and edit people's memories and make them forget things — they usually remember not remembering so someone smart (like Johannes) can pick up on it. Horst doesn't particularly like doing this and rarely has to when it comes to feeding.
- Older Than They Look: Though he's older than Johannes by a few years, Horst looks younger, thanks to being a vampire for the past twelve-odd years.
- The Pornomancer: Was very popular with ladies before becoming a vampire, with the most infamous incident being an evening spent on having fun with an entire women's lacrosse teamnote , which, in his recollection, was initiated by them rather than him. After becoming a vampire, however, he became functionally asexual.
- Precision F-Strike: Horst gets two.
- The first, when Johannes (driven to be cruel by way of demonic possession) tells him essentially 'help me steal souls or I'll never cure your vampirism.' Horst pointedly walks (at a normal pace) until he's eye to eye with his brother and says 'Go fuck yourself, Johannes.'
- In The Brothers Cabal, Horst is out of sorts in his new castle digs, having dinner with a bunch of people he doesn't know or like. When one of the men makes a joke about Horst being an old man's name, Horst gives him a look and says "Who the fuck are you?"
- Sense Loss Sadness: Misses normal human food, as he can't really eat it anymore. When he briefly recovers his humanity in the fifth book, he immediately raids the buffet, and in every scene until he returns to vampirism, he can be seen eating something.
- Super-Reflexes: In addition to physical speed, Horst can use his vampire powers to think faster than usual stretching objective seconds into subjective minutes. He mainly does this once during Brothers Cabal in order to have an internal dialogue with his vampire self and spring into action.
- Super-Speed: Horst has vampire speed letting him move faster than people can see, and it often borders on Flash Step when he makes quick little 'blurs.'
- The Strength of Ten Men: This is explicitly mentioned in the narration to describe Horst's vampire super-strength.
Leonie Barrow
Leonie Barrow
A young Englishwoman whose life is certainly changed for the stranger when the Cabal Bros Carnival rolls into her town. A daughter of a retired cop, she inherited his investigative skills and cold blood, and by the time the younger of Cabal brothers steps back into her life, she's much better prepared.- Action Girl: Proficient in several types of firearms. She totes a giant shotgun for most of the second half of The Fall of the House of Cabal.
- Back from the Dead: She's gunned down by a Mirkavian sniper when sneaking aboard the Rubrum Imperatrix; however, when Cabal returns with the Fountain of Youth vials, he uses one to bring her back.
- Badass Normal: One of the few recurring characters without any supernatural powers who can keep up with Cabal. Made even more apparent in The Fall, where her group consists of a necromancer, a vampire, a witch, a demon and her.
- Great Detective: Studies criminology and psychology, and dreams of becoming this one day. In The Fall, her section of the Five Ways (titled, appropriately, "Leonie Barrow, the Great Detective") has her solve a Holmesian murder mystery, with Horst playing her Watson.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Upon entering an alternate London in The Fall, she's delighted to find that the Ways have provided her with a massive shotgun, which she ends up putting to good use.
- Start X to Stop X: In Detective, this is her philosophy regarding Cabal — he's a monster, but a highly-skilled one, there are worse monsters aboard the Princess Hortense, so it's best to point him in their direction. By the time of book 5 she has much different opinion on him, largely thanks to Johannes' Character Development.
- Took a Level in Badass: She goes from a young woman way out of her depth in Necromancer to an adept investigator in Detective and a Great Detective, as well as an Action Girl, in The Fall.
- Walking the Earth: Underplayed; at the end of The Fall, she and Zarenyia decide to travel around Europe before Leonie returns home, mostly to recuperate from the events in the Ways.
Zarenyia
Zarenyia
A succubine devil — that is, a demon not affiliated with hell — whom Cabal summons as a guide on his journey into the Abyss. Aside from being rather flighty and flirty, she also happens to be a giant spider from the waist down, and always happy to shag and kill some people (in this exact order). Having grown fond of Cabal during their excursion into the Pandaemonium, she's more than happy to help him again when he summons her back.- Action Girl: As a giant half-spider, half-humanoid demon, she's perhaps the strongest member of the team in the fifth book, especially since she doesn't share Horst's reliance on blood or aversion to sunlight. She's certainly the most deadly.
- Comedic Sociopathy: She's always happy to murder some people, and her penchant for gory murder is always played for laughs.
- Dumb Blonde: Often acts like a one (albeit a murderous kind), though her internal monologue makes it clear a lot of it is an act.
- Hammerspace: Since she lacks Magic Pants, she has a giant interdimensional closet where she can store and retrieve all her clothes.
- Hot as Hell: All her human forms are invariably extremely attractive.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Her modus operandi is to wrap someone up, drain them of their... vital essence... and then kill them, preferably quickly.
- Jumped at the Call: She's positively excited to be summoned by Cabal, since she's called on so rarely. Even moreso the second time, as she knows where he goes, fun (which is to say, murder and gore) follow.
- So What Do We Do Now?: What happened to her between A Long Spoon and The Fall of the House of Cabal. Her trip to Pandaemonium with Cabal was the most exciting thing to happen to her in ages, and after coming back, she found her old haunts incredibly boring and dreary. Suffice to say, she's more than happy when he summons her again.
- Spider People: Succubines in Johannes Cabal's world are humanoid from the waist up and giant spiders from the waist down. She can also create silk, which she uses for everything from climbing to wrapping up her targets.
- Succubi and Incubi: As a succubine, she feeds by having sex with people, and can also make them utterly lose their minds just by kissing them.
- Walking the Earth: Since the events of the Third Way make her persona non grata in Hell, she decides to join Leonie in her trip across Europe at the end of the series.
- Who Dares?: In The Fall', she starts with the who "Who dares summon..." stock speech before noticing it was Cabal, whereupon she immediately switches to her usual preppy self, to the great confusion of Horst and Leonie.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: She can willingly "fold" her spider half, transforming into a regular-looking (though drop-dead gorgeous) woman.
Miss Smith
Miss Smith
A former necromantrix (a female necromancer), whose body was killed by a torches-and-pitchforks mob while her mind was visiting Dreamlands. As a result, she became a permanent resident there. Cabal is familiar with her through reputation, and has raided her house for books after the crowds left. She doesn't mind, and when Cabal visits the Dreamlands, the two forge a good professional relationship.- Action Girl: Charges straight into battle, and takes down a significant portion of the enemy force.
- Ambiguous Ending: The last we see of her is her taking a vial from Fountain of Youth and vanishing from the Ways. Cabal later finds the parts of her body he'd preserved gone as well, and deduces that she must've come back to life wherever she died.
- Attack Hello: When Cabal and Zarenyia find her in the First Way, she initially attacks them, thinking they were responsible for bringing her in.
- Back from the Dead: She most likely returned back to life after drinking her vial.
- Creepy Cemetery: Where she lives in the Dreamlands.
- Lady of Black Magic: Has a magic wand she uses to channel chaos magic against her opponents in The Fall.
- Naked Freak-Out: When meeting Johannes in the Dreamlands, she has a delayed moment of embarrassment when she realizes he must have seen her naked when he undressed and broke down her corpse for Human Resources.
- Necromancer: Used to be one until her death.
- Only One Name: She's only ever called Miss Smith.
- Oracular Urchin: She's introduced as the "wise witch of the graveyard", there to give Cabal information about his quest. They both agree that's pretty much the Dreamlands trying to push her into a trope, and when met again, she doesn't have any of the trope's qualities.
- Phrase Catcher: Cabal always calls her "the indomitable Miss Smith".
- Sixth Ranger: Joins the Ways team about a third of the story in, when Cabal's Way pulls her in.
Orfilia Ninuka
Orfilia Ninuka
A young, spoiled noblewoman from Mirkavia, whose father happens to be The Power Behind The Throne of the country. Despite looking and acting like a spoiled brat, she's capable of cold blood and cruelty to match her pa. Though she goes down with the Princess Hortense when it crashes, she survives, and comes back with her father's ashes in town and burning hatred of one Johannes Cabal.- Arch-Enemy: Becomes one for Cabal come book four.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: She's furious with Cabal for killing her father, almost killing her, plunging Mirkavia into chaos and also not getting seduced by her.
- Bad Boss: Perfectly willing to gun down her own forces on an off chance of killing Horst.
- Batman Gambit: Her entire plan across the last two books is predicated on her correctly guessing what Cabal would do (aided a bit by a geas on the book she plants for him to find). It goes off without a hitch until almost the last moment.
- Big Bad: Turns out to be one in books four and five.
- Deal with the Devil: Attempted to make one for necromantic powers. However, because the demon she tried to make the deal with hates Cabal as well, he gave her powers for free.
- Face Death with Dignity: Utterly unbothered in face of her real death.
- Femme Fatale: In the second book. She tries (unsuccessfully) to seduce Cabal, and uses her public persona as a seductress to hide her criminal deeds.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: When she takes control of Mirkavia, she uses black magic, soul-stealing and sheer terror to conquer most of an alternate Europe for the sole purpose of getting revenge on Cabal. And that's not mentioning that she hears her dead dad's voice from the urn of his ashes, though that turns out to be Nyarlathotep messing with her.
- King Incognito: Spends most of The Brothers Cabal disguised as Lady Misericorde, one of her own underlings.
- Meaningful Name: Like Ophelia from Hamlet, she's the daughter of a ranking politician that the protagonist opposes and goes insane after watching the protagonist kill her father. Unlike Ophelia, she's Daddy's Little Villain, survives Going Down With The Ship, and proves herself to be a Not-So-Harmless Villain when she comes back for revenge.
- Necromancer: Gains necromantic powers between books two and four, and raises armies of zombies as Misericorde.
- Red Baron: The Red Queen.
- Revenge: Her main motivation after the second book is getting revenge on Cabal for all he's done.
- Spoiled Brat: In the second book. Marechal gives her pretty much everything she wants, and she spends her days living in luxury and seducing any man to catch her fancy. After the crash, however, her demeanor changes drastically.
- Sorcerous Overlord: Becomes a Queen of Mirkavia after becoming a necromantrix.
- Uncertain Doom: She's last seen staring at Cabal from the window as the Ways collapse around her.
- You Killed My Father: The main reason behind her hatred of Cabal.
Nyarlathotep
Nyarlathotep
The one and only Crawling Chaos, the Messenger of the Outer Gods, Faceless God, Black Pharaoh, Dark Demon etc., etc. While he's usually off destroying civilization and having mean fun with hapless sentient creatures, Cabal's attempts to truly resurrect the dead catch his attention — never a good thing. His presence is a mixed blessing; though he enjoys laying traps and hurdles in Cabal's way, there's always something to be gained from his meddling.- Devil in Disguise: Spends most of Fear Institute masquerading as Bose, one of Cabal's travelling companions. For bonus points, he heavily implies that he's also Satan in his spare time.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Even after he reveals himself, he and Cabal are capable of having a somewhat polite conversation, and Cabal survives the encounter more or less unscathed.
- Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Finds the idea of destroying an entire civilization hilarious.
- Humanoid Abomination: Obviously, being a Lovecraftian god. He's a Reality Warper usually wearing human form.
- It Amused Me: The only reason for anything he does.
- The Man Behind the Man: In The Fall, it's revealed that the voice Ninuka hears from the urn of her father's ashes is actually him messing with her and urging her on for his own amusement.
- Jackass Genie: His specialty is granting people's wishes in the most horrible way possible.
- Reality Warper: Capable of altering reality — at least in the dreamlands — to tremendous degree. At one point, he even sets the moon on fire.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Is known for having a thousand faces, and may in fact have even more.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Some of his forms can drive the onlooker insane.
Berenice (Spoiler character)
Berenice
Once upon a time, Johannes Cabal was on track to have a normal, if boring life, a normal, if boring job and a normal wife. Though he wasn't very eager for the first two, he was quite happy to spend the rest of his days with the girl he was in love with. Alas, she drowned, and her death spurred him to abandon the ordinary life and become a necromancer.- Drop Dead Gorgeous: She's beautiful even in death, at least to Cabal's eyes.
- Given Name Reveal: Her name is offhandedly revealed in the last pages of the final book.
- Healing Vat: Underplayed; Cabal keeps her in a glass vat, suspended in a solution that completely stops her body from decomposing.
- Lost Lenore: For Cabal. Attempting to bring her back from the dead is his driving motivation throughout the series.
- No Name Given: For vast majority of the story, she's simply referred to as "her" or "Johannes' beloved".
- Posthumous Character: She died over eight years before The Necromancer.
- Uncertain Doom: It's unclear whether her corpse survives the fire at Cabal's house.
