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This is a complex, dark, and gorgeously written horror novel; I definitely recommend it if you can tolerate some pretty bleak, visceral descriptions of realistic atrocities.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky starts in Malaga, where Isabel, an isolated academic living pretty much hand-to-mouth, gradually develops a prickly kind of friendship--or even familial relationship--with an older man she at first knows only as The Eye. They're both expatriates of a fictional South American country, Magera, which underwent a violent, totalitarian coup when Isabel was a child. (One nudged along, unsurprisingly, by the CIA--the most terrifying thing in The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a calm, professional American man in a suit, quietly pushing things along for his higher power.) The Eye turns out to be Avendaño, Magera's most famous poet, a larger-than-life figure as famous for his outbursts, insults, and affairs as he was for his poetry (which Isabel has never liked--"self-indulgent and misogynistic... if they did not celebrate drunken womanizing, then they were pensive and shallow explorations into the most rudimentary and puerile existentialism"). But Avendaño lost his poetry in Magera, along with his eye, and now he just wants to enjoy the small pleasures he has left--and try to live with the horrors of his past.
But then he's drawn back to Magera, even though he knows it might mean his death, and Isabel is left alone to house-sit his lavish apartment--and to find the troubling manuscript he left behind, a memoir of his horrifying captivity and torture at the hands of the new Mageran government. It's also a memoir of his own experience with a found manuscript, a kind of abstract guide to Lovecraftian witchcraft, which he begins to translate. Isabel sinks into Avendaño's history even as she has to figure out what to do with her present and what risks she should potentially take to save Avendaño from whatever has found him in Magera.
What this novella does brilliantly is intertwine the real world horrors of coups, dictatorships, and uncaring international chess games with supernatural and cosmic horrors; it pulls this off in a way that heightens both. It feels like it understands both the realistic and symbolic/metaphorical nightmares it's describing, which is no mean feat--sometimes things translated into fantasy wind up dwindling what they're trying to evoke, or offering cheap solutions to real problems. Jacobs doesn't do that. And the characters are interesting--Avendaño's guilt and deflated arrogance are really well-done, as is Isabel's growing sense of connection not only with him but with the world around her (her queerness is nicely and casually handled as just a background part of her character).
It's also beautifully, richly written. There's a line here that describes a particular kind of sudden, freezing panic so well that I kind of hate Jacobs for coming up with it. Here's the opening:
I can recognize a Mageran in any city of the world. Violence leaves its mark, and horror makes siblings of us all. A diaspora of exiles, dreaming of home.
On the streets, they called him "The Eye" for obvious reasons--the eyepatch, of course, but also his wary, sleepless demeanor. He would sit in the afternoons in the Parque de Huelin in the shade, a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, a Bali cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The patch made him look like a veteran, and I guess we both were, though he was much older than I was then. I remember the scent of cloves around him, and the smell of the sea that we could hear but not sea. It hissed and murmured at us from beyond the Paseo Maritimo. At the time, I was teaching writing and poetry at the Universidad de Malaga. In the evenings I would ride my Vespa down to the park to catch a breeze from the sea, to drink in the cafes and watch the young, bronzed women, happy and glowing, and forget about Magera. And Pedro Pablo Vidal, the cruel. And my family. I was young and very poor.
This isn't in print on its own anymore, but it's available with another novella in a collection called A Lush and Seething Hell.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky starts in Malaga, where Isabel, an isolated academic living pretty much hand-to-mouth, gradually develops a prickly kind of friendship--or even familial relationship--with an older man she at first knows only as The Eye. They're both expatriates of a fictional South American country, Magera, which underwent a violent, totalitarian coup when Isabel was a child. (One nudged along, unsurprisingly, by the CIA--the most terrifying thing in The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a calm, professional American man in a suit, quietly pushing things along for his higher power.) The Eye turns out to be Avendaño, Magera's most famous poet, a larger-than-life figure as famous for his outbursts, insults, and affairs as he was for his poetry (which Isabel has never liked--"self-indulgent and misogynistic... if they did not celebrate drunken womanizing, then they were pensive and shallow explorations into the most rudimentary and puerile existentialism"). But Avendaño lost his poetry in Magera, along with his eye, and now he just wants to enjoy the small pleasures he has left--and try to live with the horrors of his past.
But then he's drawn back to Magera, even though he knows it might mean his death, and Isabel is left alone to house-sit his lavish apartment--and to find the troubling manuscript he left behind, a memoir of his horrifying captivity and torture at the hands of the new Mageran government. It's also a memoir of his own experience with a found manuscript, a kind of abstract guide to Lovecraftian witchcraft, which he begins to translate. Isabel sinks into Avendaño's history even as she has to figure out what to do with her present and what risks she should potentially take to save Avendaño from whatever has found him in Magera.
What this novella does brilliantly is intertwine the real world horrors of coups, dictatorships, and uncaring international chess games with supernatural and cosmic horrors; it pulls this off in a way that heightens both. It feels like it understands both the realistic and symbolic/metaphorical nightmares it's describing, which is no mean feat--sometimes things translated into fantasy wind up dwindling what they're trying to evoke, or offering cheap solutions to real problems. Jacobs doesn't do that. And the characters are interesting--Avendaño's guilt and deflated arrogance are really well-done, as is Isabel's growing sense of connection not only with him but with the world around her (her queerness is nicely and casually handled as just a background part of her character).
It's also beautifully, richly written. There's a line here that describes a particular kind of sudden, freezing panic so well that I kind of hate Jacobs for coming up with it. Here's the opening:
I can recognize a Mageran in any city of the world. Violence leaves its mark, and horror makes siblings of us all. A diaspora of exiles, dreaming of home.
On the streets, they called him "The Eye" for obvious reasons--the eyepatch, of course, but also his wary, sleepless demeanor. He would sit in the afternoons in the Parque de Huelin in the shade, a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, a Bali cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The patch made him look like a veteran, and I guess we both were, though he was much older than I was then. I remember the scent of cloves around him, and the smell of the sea that we could hear but not sea. It hissed and murmured at us from beyond the Paseo Maritimo. At the time, I was teaching writing and poetry at the Universidad de Malaga. In the evenings I would ride my Vespa down to the park to catch a breeze from the sea, to drink in the cafes and watch the young, bronzed women, happy and glowing, and forget about Magera. And Pedro Pablo Vidal, the cruel. And my family. I was young and very poor.
This isn't in print on its own anymore, but it's available with another novella in a collection called A Lush and Seething Hell.