Cover Reveal: A Lush And Seething Hell

So, you maybe know this, you maybe don’t, but John Hornor Jacobs is a helluva writer. He is easily one of my favorite writers. If we’re being serious? Just between you and me? He’s too good. It’s gross. He needs to dial that shit back a little, come back down to Earth with the rest of us. I mean, The Incorruptibles is what if Lord of the Rings seduced The Gunslinger and had a heretic demon baby. The Twelve-Fingered Boy is Shawshank Redemption in Juvie except then, it’s also the X-Men? And I hate doing that, I hate dicing his books up into har har what if The Terminator and the Gilmore Girls got stuck in a teleporter together, because they’re so much richer than that. He has a way with words, with characters, it’s honestly a writer working at the top of his game — and you probably haven’t even read his books. (Nab ’em in print or eBook.)

That ends now, I hope.

He’s got a couple new novellas coming out collected in a print edition called A Lush And Seething Hell, which contains the novellas The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky and My Heart Struck Sorrow.

Both of which are amazing, and I’d say more about them now, but I can’t — because I’m also writing the introduction to this collection of novellas, because I’m fancy like that.

But! We will cover reveal the amazing cover to this collection below.

First, the book’s description:

The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales—both never-before-published in print—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.

And some blurbs for spice:

“It’s time to declare John Hornor Jacobs as major author: every sentence he writes feels drawn from a pit of fire and hammered into a sword. The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is transporting, disorienting, appalling, and gorgeous.” – Daniel Kraus, Award-winning author of The Shape of Water, Trollhunters, and The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch

“Jacobs just keeps getting better. Seldom has cosmic horror been so naturalistically, so vividly, wrought. The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a squirm-inducing glimpse of humanity’s inner darkness, and worse.” – Laird Barron, Award-winning author of Blood Standard, The Croning, and Occultations

“The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is lush, terrifying, beautiful, and disturbing–and hands-down my favorite novella of the year. John Hornor Jacobs’ language draws you into a world of mounting dread, where all-too-human acts of violence bleed into supernatural horror. I read the last half of the book in one sitting, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. Don’t miss this.” – Daryl Gregory, Award-winning author of Spoonbenders, Pandemonium, Raising Stony Mayhall, and We Are All Completely Fine

“Ending stories of cosmic horror effectively is perhaps the most difficult part of writing them. So much has been hinted at in the early pages of the story, it’s a challenge to arrive at a climax that doesn’t squander those hints by either diluting or overinflating them. Jacobs walks this narrative tightrope with grace and bravura, bringing his novella to a crescendo that is at once shocking and resonant. A story of transformations and translations, of the wounds history inflicts upon the self, of the scars we embrace to save ourselves, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is moving and memorable, one of the novellas of the year.” – John Langan, Bram Stoker Award-Winning author of The Fisherman, writing in Locus Magazine

A dash of buy-this-damn-book links…

Psst buy it.

And now, the cover, by Jeffrey Alan Love: