“The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is moving and memorable, one of the novellas of the year.” — Locus MagazineThey had escaped their country, but they couldn’t escape the pastHaving lost both her home and family to a brutal dictatorship, Isabel has fled to Spain, where she watches young, bronzed beauties and tries to forget the horrors that lie in her homeland. Shadowing her always, attired in … horrors that lie in her homeland.
Shadowing her always, attired in rumpled linen suits and an eyepatch, is “The Eye,” a fellow ex-pat and poet with a notorious reputation. An unlikely friendship blossoms, a kinship of shared grief. Then The Eye receives a mysterious note and suddenly returns home, his fate uncertain.
Left with the keys to The Eye’s apartment, Isabel finds two of his secret manuscripts: a halting translation of an ancient, profane work, and an evocative testament of his capture during the revolution. Both texts bear disturbing images of blood and torture, and the more Isabel reads the more she feels the inexplicable compulsion to go home.
It means a journey deep into a country torn by war, still ruled by a violent regime, but the idea of finding The Eye becomes ineluctable. Isabel feels the manuscripts pushing her to go. Her country is lost, and now her only friend is lost, too. What must she give to get them back? In the end, she has only herself left to sacrifice.
THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY asks:
How does someone simply give up their home…especially when their home won’t let them?
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4.5/5 stars!
“Misery is a condition that we are all promised.”
THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY is a beautifully written novella with rich, layered characters and an unfamiliar landscape.
Two ex-pats develop a friendship between them. Isabel, an educator and Avendano, a poet, have both escaped a political coup in their home country of (the fictional) Magera. As their friendship deepens, Isabel learns more about Avendano’s reputation and his past. When he asks her to watch his apartment so that he may return to Magera, she does so willingly. While so doing, she reads a few of the manuscripts he left behind. It’s in these manuscripts that the true horror lies. Will Avendano ever return home? If he does will he find Isabel there waiting for him? You’ll have to read this novella to find out!
I loved this book and that’s mostly because the characters of Avendano and Isabel are so deep and well drawn. I did not expect to develop such complicated feelings for characters in “A Novella of Cosmic Horror.” But develop them I did-especially for Avendano. I disliked him quite a bit when the story began, but I empathized with what he went through later, (or actually, before), and my feelings for him changed dramatically.
Whenever I see or hear the term “cosmic horror” lately, I find myself thinking of tentacles. But cosmic horror runs much deeper than that, and in this book it plays a small but certainly disturbing part of the narrative. When the miasma becomes so thick you can almost cut through it, watch out. There are things in that stinking fog, things existing just beyond the limits our visibility, but all too alive just the same.
The real horrors here are executed by humans and they make tentacles and Cthulhu look downright silly. It’s easy to overlook coups in other countries, easy to overlook the human rights violations and the often abominable acts. We don’t seem them on our daily news, so to us they seem foreign and distant. But for the people living under military rule or the rule of dictators or religious leaders? They see these horrors every day and sadly, they are now just part of life. When anyone dares to look more closely, like Avendano for instance, who knows what horrors will befall them as a result? They may take the form of torture, they may take the form of torturing those you love, they can even make you torture yourself, and that’s the worst torture of all. ” The pain becomes an offering and sacrifice becomes a beacon.”
A beacon to what? That is the question.
I’ve tried hard to impart to you the gravity as well as the beauty hidden behind that oh so lovely cover. I’ve tried to do it without spoiling anything, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded. The writing is sublime and I got lost a few times, just ruminating on the beauty of the language. That doesn’t happen often these days, but it happened several times within the pages of this beautiful, scary, depressing, lovely novella and for that reason I highly recommend this book.
Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/2PsjNFX
*I received a Kindle copy of this book in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it.*
A masterpiece of modern cosmic horror that grounds itself in humanity. Jacobs does a lot with a little; his prose is lyrical and evocative. The setting and characters are captivating and unique to the genre. Moving cosmic horror away from the dreary hills of New England and to the streets of Málaga, Spain and the mountains of South America was a refreshing change. The result is a surprisingly deep novella that recasts cosmic horror’s themes with a raw originality. I was enthralled from start to finish.