Title: A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror

Author: John Hornor Jacobs

Publisher: Harper Voyager 2019

Genre: Horror

Pages: 368

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: 52 Book Club - Survival Story

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.

A mixed bag of two stories. I did not connect with or enjoy the first story, The Sea Dreams It is the Sky. I was intrigued by the characters and their pasts under a brutal dictatorship. What they both witnesses and experienced was horrific, no doubt. It just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I kept waiting for the Lovecraftian horror to descend. It never really got there for me. But then I dove into the second story, My Heart Struck Sorrow, and I was instantly feeling that lingering sense of dread. I couldn’t wait to see what would be revealed in Harlan Parker’s journals. The story unfolds slowly, letting you glimpses little bits of horror along the way, until it culminates in a truly terrifying chapter near the end. I had to take a few minutes after finishing the story to digest everything I had just read. That second story got a 5 star rating, but the first story only got 3 stars. So I averaged those out to give the collection 4 stars.

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