A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror

I have just finished the first story called The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky. It's about this young literature lecturer in Spain, she is originally from a fictional country in Latin America called 'Magera'. Magera is under a dictatorship, and her parents were among those who have been 'disappeared'. While out one day, she meets this older man who it turns out is the missing Mageran poet Avendaño. From there, a series of events leads her back to Magera in order to deal with the tragic history of her country and her own past.

First off, the plot rings close to home because I am from the Philippines, where we also had/have the phenomenon of 'desaparecidos'. Thousands of people - students, activists, civic leaders, ordinary citizens were show more disappeared by agents of the state bent on fighting the supposed scourge of communism. This had its heyday in the 70s and 80s during the Marcos dictatorship, but this pattern of 'enforced disappearances' has continued in the succeeding administrations up to the current one under Duterte.

The integration of the supernatural with the mundane, as well as the quality of the prose reminds me of Clive Barker's works. Surprisingly, I did not expect how good the action/fight scenes would be. I feel like this novella would make for a really good movie. Overall, it is a tightly-written supernatural tale against the backdrop of a horrific political reality. show less

Showing that there is plenty of mileage to be had from Lovecraftian cosmic horror, stripped of its period racism and insularity. Two disturbing novellas, in marvellously fertile settings: a lightly-anonymised version of post-coup Chile, and the Library of Congress's folk music project in the '30s and today. Both felt just a little over-researched, with the sources or advisors showing – something Lovecraft was guilty of too. But great stuff.

After reading THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY, I became an instant fan of John Hornor Jacobs. A LUSH AND SEETHING HELL reassured me that my respect and high esteem for the man was earned and well placed.

This book is comprised of two stories, the first a novella, (the aforementioned THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY), and the second, a short novel titled MY HEART STRUCK SORROW. This review is going to focus almost solely on the second tale.

When I saw on Twitter that this book was coming out, I clicked the pre-order button right away. (There wasn't a description there yet, and I didn't know that THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY was going to be included. When I did discover that, I didn't care because...support.) You can find my review of THE SEA show more DREAMS IT IS THE SKY here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2581295778?book_show_action=false&from...

I went into MY HEART STRUCK SORROW almost totally blind. I was excited to find out that music was a central theme to this tale. I'm a lover of Blues music and I'm fascinated by many of the old artists who were the basis for a lot of the popular music of today. You cannot imagine how stoked I was to find a deep connection with music from the old south in this book.

Cromwell and Harriet are called in to the Parker estate to itemize and catalog Parker's extensive collection of old acetate recordings and journals. I loved this way of framing the story as we are then taken to Parker's point of view for much of the book. He was traveling the south interviewing and recording musicians as an ethnomusicologist, (like the real-life Alan Lomax), dedicated to capturing and preserving music. He traveled with a SoundScriber, the heavy, awkward machine with which he recorded said musicians.

These artists and the areas in which they lived were brought to vivid life in my mind's eye. I easily pictured them. I smelled them. I felt the humidity and heat of the south. I felt the humanity in their songs, and how they changed from one town to another, especially the songs about Stagger Lee. (Or Stacker Lee, or whatever title was used.)

"In Mississippi, in the delta of Arkansas and northern Louisiana, they speak in harsh tones, clipped syllables, as if their entire morphology of communication were angry and inflamed."

One of the men he interviews, Honeyboy, is actually in prison. Parker is able to obtain permission to interview and record him. During those scenes I came across this passage:

"Even the guards laughed at this, and for a while the barracks were full of the laughter of incarcerated men. They sounded like any group of men gathered together. Each full of his own particular sorrow, his mirth, his guilt, the comet's tail of his existence pulling wreckage after him."

This got me to thinking about my comet's tail and what kind of wreckage I carry around within it.

Jacobs deftly weaves the threads of the past and the present, most especially those of Parker and Cromwell. Turns out they had a few things in common. I didn't see what they were at first, but as this tale unraveled, I did. Grief, loss and most of all, guilt, come to each life-how we handle those things, or not handle them as the case may be, made for an engaging and stunning denouement.

I find myself lacking the words and/or skills to properly communicate to you how this book made me feel and why I think you should read it. The tales within are distinctly different from each other, one more a tale of torture, politics and cosmic horror, the other- for me, being at heart a story of loss, guilt, and grief, well framed and partially hidden in a tale about blues and folk music. I'm not going to pretend that I "got" everything there is to get with this story, I already know I will read it again. I'm not going to pretend that I know a lot about ethnomusicology, but I can say I want to learn more about it and about Alan Lomax in general.

Leaving behind my inadequacies in getting across how this tale made me feel, I'll wrap with saying that both stories here are extremely well written, unique, thought provoking and powerful. I'll leave you with this quote:

"We are sound waves crashing against the shore with no SoundScriber to take down our likeness, our facsimile. Words like these are just echoes of that original sound. We are but small vibrations on the face of the universe."

With that, my fellow small vibration on the face of the universe, I give A LUSH AND SEETHING HELL my HIGHEST recommendation!

Available October 6th, but you can pre-order here: https://amzn.to/2kXiu92

*Thanks to Harper Voyager and NetGalley for the e-ARC in exchange for my honest feedback. I'm buying the book anyway, but I got to read it sooner this way!*

**Please forgive me for the quotes, but I felt they were necessary to help convey me feelings.** show less

I can't think of anything much to say about this. It was good. It was fine. Think I liked the first one better, felt more cosmic horrory, and the intersection of regimes that torture with the idea of sacrifice and summoning and the setting evocative of South American magical realists worked pretty well. Second one, I should probably go listen to Stagger Lee some time to see what all the fuss is about, but the collecting of folk song leading to the uncovering of a dark folk tradition is also a neat one but God, horny men feeling guilty about their adulterous affairs (while grieving for a dead wife and kid, no less) is kinda boring - yes you are a bad person, no you didn't have to traverse time and space via journals and musical show more recordings in an odyssey of summoning and evil then falling into an open grave to prove it. show less

Two brilliant novellas that meld Lovecraftian weird fiction with Latin American magical realism ("The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky") and Southern Gothic ("My Heart Struck Sorrow"), respectively, to make for some very refreshing and imaginative cosmic horror. Searing, smart, and scary as hell.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this title.

not sorry to have read this but not wowed either. I listened because Ian Lynch recommended it on his podcast on the strength of the second story, the ethnomusicology one. I enjoyed that story a lot more than the first, though I don't rate either all that highly -- they're both overwritten and neither does a *great* job integrating the horror elements with the themes of the rest of the story, especially in the first story the cursed manuscript stuff feels to me like it's been bolted onto the torture / state repression / midcentury US imperialism stuff without much real reason for the two to be joined

A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
by John Honor Jacob's
due 10-8-2019
Harper Voyage
4.0 /5.0

#netgalley #ALushAndSeethingHell

This pair is chilling tales have never been published. They explore the darker side of human nature. Exceptionally well written, this is top-notch haunting horror.
'The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky'
A once famous poet, Avedano, and his young student Isobel Certa, both exiles from the dictatorship of Magera, South America, are living in Spain. Isobel finds a journal kept by Avedano whose entries are so disturbing she begins to spiral into a world of corruption.

'My Heart Struck Sorrow'
A librarian discovers journals and acetate recordings of a man who recorded blues music in the Deep South, and begins to go show more mad as he uncovers the origins and roots of a popular blues song.

Thanks to netgalley for sending this e-book ARC for review. show less