Although, as readers, we might share Boone's sense of persecution (and this is something of the appeal of Nightbreed), the adaptation to film gives us a more stable point of view - in the character of Joyce. While institutionalized, he is confronted by his psychiatrist to a series of photos of murders he might've or might've not committed. In resolving that Boone remains her soulmate, despite his death and transformation, and in sharing the burden of the future of the Nightbreed, she is accepting 'otherness' and rejecting Eigerman's view of the world that tomorrow should go back to 'normal. While Clive describes the book in overview as "a romance for dead people," he admits that, "the romance is sometimes very perverse; I mean, what's going on between Boone and Lori is extremely perverse - they fall more and more deeply in love the deader they get! This book is quite short and has so much pace that it's almost impossible to put down - which is good of course - has characters that come across plausible and likeable, events that stretch the imagination and horrors that are both explained and implied so that your mind is constantly flexing, conjuring both the author's and your own images, which I like - some books just info dump too much and leave little to the imagination.

Clive Barker directed the 1990 film version named Nightbreed, which is actually a better title for the novel than Cabal. Certain mythological elements have increased, such as the fact that Boone is now revealed as the seventh saviour come to save Midian, as opposed to just being a guy who happens along. Along the way, she makes friends with Sheryl, who accompanies her, though Sheryl stays in town and does not enter the cemetery.The story picks up with Boone's gal with a heart of gold, Lori, who does not receive well the news that her lover's body has up and disappeared from the morgue. Heaven has no place for a man like him, nor it seems does Hell, and he is too much of a danger to society to remain free so, Midian then - the place of legend, where the half-dead go, the Nightbreed, where Baphomet rules. The footage was edited down from Clive's epic sweep to a fast-paced roller coaster ride in which key plot elements were discarded, leaving the remainder confused if tantalisingly visually elegant. Narcisse's self-disfigurement in removing his face is opposite to the usual expectations of a narcissist, A.

Unable to live with his crimes, Boone decides that he must die, but death seems to shrink from him and his suicide attempt fails.Here he first hears the whispers of Midian, a fabled city where those who ‘ do not quite fit‘, run too and all are accepted. The creatures in the medieval vision of Heaven and Hell, the creatures that live underground and would be the devils, are in fact the human forces.

Using the motif of moon-lit skies and tapping into the rich seam of lunar mythology, the screenplay layers the foreground action of murder, deceit and broken vows with reminders that we are being told a tale that draws on old-world hopes and fears - the legends of were-folk and smoke-spirits, psychic powers and prophecy. Those, I decided, were the words that Domingo de Ybarrondo had written and which I chose to introduce this book about the shunned and the outlawed species of which I, as a gay man, felt myself a member.

Clive Barker's written works The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser, Cabal, Nightbreed, A Thing Untrue, A Fool Rises and introductions to Sacred Monsters, Visions of Heaven and Hell and The Making of Nightbreed, including drafts held within the author's archive.