A Lush and Seething Hell
Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
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4.0 • 4개의 평가
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- US$16.99
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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 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.
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Just plain bad
Boring, pointless and phony. It’s a horror story that feels sterile and lifeless, and the characters feel as bland as possible. It all is incredibly inauthentic in a genre that depends entirely on connecting with the characters and their experiences. The characters are different from the experiences of the author, which is admirable of him to try, but they come across as a safe take based on an amalgamation of textbook narratives of other cultures.
He included cultural sensitivity screeners in his process, but in this sub genre of horror, there must be an otherizing of something to produce that essential element of fear; like Lovecraft said, we fear the unknown, what we don’t understand. The otherizing doesn’t have to be race-based, but there has to be an element of the sinister in the characters and groups in these stories, otherwise it’s bland.
For example (spoilers?): in the first story, the bad guys are a generic fascist South American political party during the Cold War, just a bland cut and paste fascist style government. It’s divorced from the context of the Cold War, no one in the story supports the regime, but it persists in a nonsensical plot involving forbidden knowledge. There’s no explanation of why the US government would support such a regime, no context to explain the human impulse to protect oneself (Cuban Missile Crisis, anyone?). There’s no details that explain why the crisis in the fictional country is even happening. The bad guys are just bad for the same sophomoric “capitalism is bad for bad’s sake” that is seen so often. It’s a hackneyed black-and-white college campus kind of mindset that is just so blasé and run of the mill that it screams “why bother.”
John Horner Jacob is a hack. He lacks the ability to maintain an interesting narrative, his characters are paper thin, and this just reeks of a 2020s take on a genre that really can’t be made safe for those who fear to offend. This was my first experience with his work, and it will be my last. Get better or just stop.