A Lush and Seething Hell

Two Tales of Cosmic Horror

Paperback, 384 pages

English language

Published April 13, 2020 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN:
978-0-06-288083-3
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4 stars (5 reviews)

A World Fantasy Award Nominee! 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 …

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Review of 'A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Although I would say this book isn’t quite the “cosmic horror” it is advertised at, its two stories are very good. The Sea dreams it is the Sky hints in its first parts more of Borges or Garcia Marquez than of Lovecraft (although it falters towards the end with some out of place action sequences), and imagines links between the tortuous regimes of Latin America and evil presences in other worlds. My Heart Struck Sorrow and its pursuit of the dark origins of the folk song Stagger Lee is mesmerizing and incredibly well written.

And the audio book version has some of the best narrators I’ve heard in a long time. A pleasure to listen to.

Review of 'A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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 disappeared by agents of the state bent on fighting the supposed scourge of communism. This had its heyday in the 70s and …

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