Weird book. I mean, Cabal is obviously meant to be a bit of a twat. But in the first chapter he just goes, oh well, better pop down to Hell and have a chat to Satan. This ought to only work if you're some sort of grotesquely powerful big deal, and so you get the impression that Cabal is, and he just isn't. It's refreshing to see this stuff presented without a huge sense of drama and whatnot, but either Cabal needs to be able to justify that lack of drama for doing a big thing or the story needs a better sense of majesty. The problem the Nightside books always had was that amazing things happened but the prose was so pedestrian that you missed out on half the coolness and sense of wonder; this starts almost like that but then turns into a normal story, assuming that stories can be composed entirely of snarky comments, which I like. Horst is way cooler than Johannes is.