A Lush and Seething Hell

August 19, 2019
Jacobs’s collection bundles two evocative novellas exploring human depravity and corruption. “The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky” focuses on the tenuous relationship between aging, once-infamous poet Rafael Avendaño and young academic Isabel Certa, both exiles from the dictator-ravaged South American country of Magera and now living in Málaga, Spain. When Isabel finds Rafael’s journal and his attempts to translate an unsettling text (“It is a lure, a sweet aroma,/ the killing and/ the letting of blood”) from Latin and Greek into Spanish, she descends into a world of unthinkable corruption. In “My Heart Struck Sorrow,” a librarian discovers the journals and recordings of a man who recorded blues music in the Deep South, and learns of his fall into madness as he uncovers the Satanic roots of a popular blues tune. In Jacobs’s work, the present is held in a manacled grip by the foolishness and horrors of the past. His writing is meticulous, detailed, and atmospheric, evoking a sense of place and suspense in equal turns. Horror readers will enjoy Jacobs’s dark vision of human nature. Agent: Stacia Decker, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary.

September 1, 2019
Two lush, sprawling novellas that are nothing like each other except that they're both scary as hell. Arkansas-based novelist Jacobs (Infernal Machines, 2017, etc.) is a wildly diverse writer whose work ranges from the teen-oriented Incarcerado trilogy to a wetwork nightmare zombie survival epic (This Dark Earth, 2012). Like some of his contemporaries, Jacobs is stretching his talents and imagination like never before, turning in two spectacular novellas. After a glowing foreword by Jacobs' fellow fabulist Chuck Wendig, the book launches into The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, a Lovecraft-ian horror story set in a fictionalized South American nation. In it, a young academic named Isabel Certa becomes involved with a famous one-eyed poet named Rafael Avendaño, a cavalier scoundrel who's heading into a war zone, leaving Isabel money, his apartment, and a cat for her protection as well as an obsession-inducing poem called "A Little Night Work" that Isabel spends all her time translating. The story is operatic in scale while the flavor leans closer to Roberto Bolaño or the weirdness of César Aira than the traditional horror genre. Then there's the chill-inducing, artfully paced My Heart Struck Sorrow, in which we're introduced to Cromwell, a librarian from the Library of Congress who specializes in oral tradition--and is suffering extreme shame about cheating on his wife. Through sheer coincidence, he accidentally stumbles upon a long-hidden treasure trove of blues recordings from the 1930s. Along with his assistant, Hattie, "Crumb," as she calls him, delves into the strange recordings and diary of Harlan Parker, a researcher much like himself who becomes obsessed with performances of the murder ballad "Stagger Lee." Falling somewhere between House of Leaves (2000) and The Blair Witch Project, it is a terrifying, gothic descent into madness. This book has a fitting title if there ever was one, and these nightmares are worth every penny.

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Starred review from October 1, 2019
There are horror writers who plant you in the cemetery and show you the old grave where the ghoul resides. Then there are writers like Jacobs, who ditch many of the genre's standard tools while staying true to its essential heart. The two novellas collected here are fine examples of horror that feels fresh and modern while still conjuring up the proper atmosphere. In "The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky," an expatriate professor in Spain meets an infamous poet from her South American homeland of Magera. Drawn to the poet's missing eye and obscure studies, she soon uncovers dark truths that could upend her idea of reality itself. The second tale, "My Heart Struck Sorrow," is even stronger. After a family tragedy, a music researcher for the Library of Congress stumbles into a cache of documents that put him on the trail of a grim folk song. The haunted crossroads of the Deep South hold the key to the song and, perhaps, a way out of his own pain. These stories stitch Lovecraftian cosmic horror into terrestrial elements like murder ballads, and the result is a fiercely original and disquieting work. A must-have for any serious horror collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)