A Lush and Seething Hell

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This books is composed of two novellas.

The first is “The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky.” This story begins when two exiles from the fictitious South American country of Magera meet in Spain. He is the one-eyed rascally poet, Rafael Avedano, and she is Isabel, a lesbian poetry instructor. They strike up a friendship and then he decided to return to Magera. She follows him to help him and, then, gets sucked into a world of fascist torture and the numinous supernatural.

The story is well-written. Author John Jacob Horner establishes the character as exiles and Magera as a kind of latter day Pinochet's Chile. My problem with the story was the ending. I found its ending to be unedifying and inexplicable.

The second story was “My Heart Struck Sorrow.” This story follows two storyline. In one storyline, we follow Cromwell who is dealing with his guilt after the death of his wife and son. In the other, we follow music ethnologist Harlan Parker in 1937 as he records Southern folk songs. On the path of finding the Ur-source of Stackolee, he runs into the supernatural.

I really liked the second story. The folk song element was extremely enjoyable. I did some research on Stacker Lee and was fascinated by the history of the song and the backstory. The storylines hold together and the ending worked.

I would probably rank the first story as two stars, but the second story made the sale.