John Horner Jacobs has been spinning dark tales for a few years now, but unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to read his work yet. Until now. A Lush and Seething Hell collects two novellas/short novels under one cover, “The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky” and “My Heart Struck Sorrow.” Both novellas hone in on the power of the addictive properties of truth and fiction. One novella tells the story of a Literature professor in Spain and how she becomes infected by an ancient text while the other novella reflects upon the power of song and how that intertwines with folk tales of mythic proportions in the American South.
The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition.
Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.
A brilliant mix of the psychological and supernatural, blending the acute insight of Roberto Bolaño and the eerie imagination of H. P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.
In My Heart Struck Sorrow, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South—which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.
Breathtaking and haunting, A Lush and Seething Hell is a terrifying and exhilarating journey into the darkness, an odyssey into the deepest reaches of ourselves that compels us to confront secrets best left hidden.
In “The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky,” a man known by the locals as the Eye connects with university professor, Isabel our first-person narrator, after a few weeks of mutual observation at a cafe. They come to realize they have both fled the fictional South American fascist dictatorship Magera. Isabel and The Eye develop a friendship as they share meals and go to movies together. Isabel soon realizes The Eye is in reality a rebellious, infamous poet thought dead by the fascist regime in Magera. The Eye asks Isabel to watch over his spacious home so he can return to Magera where he is most unwelcome. She knows this will not end well. When he seemingly disappears, she discovers a dark manuscript he never published, “Below, Between, Beneath, Beyond.” It seems to be an autobiography of the final years before Magera was taken over by fascists. In this the Eye’s unpublished work, Isabel learns of a translation of a text named A Little Night Work, on which he was working which seemed to consume him to the detriment of every other aspect of his life. This text consumes Isabel, too but a little differently than the Eye. She wants to help him, but the more she learns about his plight and the dark forces connected with this text readers of horror and may find has some resonation with Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. Ultimately, this is an extremely moving and potent story, which is even more effective because of Horner’s vivid prose which manages to be both relaxing and unsettling throughout the story.
In my “Heart Struck Sorrow,” we again have a hidden text with darkly magical properties, this time the text is actually a song or songs. Rather than a professor, we have the Library of Congress at the center of the story as they attempt to catalogue songs of the South in the 1930s. One of these members of the Library Congress passes away and his journal is discovered when his will is released. It is something of a travelogue of the South and the infamous Stagger Lee and the folk song inspired by the man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagger_Lee). Slightly different versions of the song are sung in each community and some people are hesitant to talk about it. The song has power, and as the story progresses, the darkness surrounding it brim to the surface. There’s a great deal in this tight story: the power of privilege, racial bias, gender bias, “ownership” of art, and so forth. Again, in this story, Jacobs’s powerful prose makes for an extremely engaging and addictive read.
Taken together, the two stories under the cover of A Lush and Seething Hell are dark and powerful. Jacobs has a great ability to lull the reader into the story with relatively mundane or familiar things, literature professors, folk songs, but soon the darkness of the tall begins to bubble to the surface. The darkness beyond our understanding makes itself known, through people’s proclivity to become addicted to story, to song, to knowledge. These two stories speak to dark potential within a person if tempted, the dark things humanity can do to each other when they find themselves in power over those weaker than themselves. Take those two things and combine them with the fearful power of The Other or the unknown, and you’ve got the makings of what could potentially be a couple of great horror stories. In Jacobs’s deft hand, those ingredients come out as darkly fascinating stories that can make you question yourself or your sanity.
Recommended
HarperVoyager | October 2019
Hardcover | 368 pages
http://www.johnhornorjacobs.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
