A Lush and Seething Hell Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword

  The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky Interstitial

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Epilogue

  My Heart Struck Sorrow 1: Cromwell: Carbon Monoxide

  2: Cromwell: Vivian

  3: Cromwell: Hattie and Harlan

  4: Cromwell: Springfield and the Parker Estate

  5: Cromwell: Introducing Stagger Lee

  6: Cromwell: Smoot Sawyer

  7: Harlan Parker: The Field Journal

  8: Harlan Parker: A Dream of Mother Chautauqua

  9: Harlan Parker: High Rank Summer

  10: Cromwell: Remembrances of a Hotel Room

  11: Harlan Parker: Bear Henstead, Amoira, and Gramp Hines

  12: Harlan Parker: The Morning After

  13: Cromwell: Amoira Hines

  14: Harlan Parker: Tenn-O-See

  15: Harlan Parker: Rosalie Davis

  16: Cromwell: Morning and Exploitation

  17: Harlan Parker: Chautauqua on the Banks of the Obion

  18: Harlan Parker: The SoundScriber

  19: Cromwell: Edmund Whitten

  20: Harlan Parker: Darcy, Arkansas

  21: Harlan Parker: The Whitmore

  22: Harlan Parker: Return of the SoundScriber

  23: Harlan Parker: Cummins State Farm

  24: Harlan Parker: Honeyboy

  25: Harlan Parker: The White Woman of the Wood

  26: Cromwell: Hattie Judges Harlan

  27: Harlan Parker: Sickness and Escape

  28: Harlan Parker: Dethero and the Bargeman

  29: Harlan Parker: Up White River, Up Hell Creek

  30: Harlan Parker: A Rind, a Crust, a Kiss

  31: Mollie Dethero: A Testament of the Events at Cidersend

  32: Cromwell: He Cannot Sleep

  33: Cromwell: Mollie in Mountain View

  Acknowledgments

  Source Books and Inspirations

  About the Author

  Also by John Hornor Jacobs

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  What you have before you is a pair of novellas. (Okay, one may be a smidge closer to a novel, but that’s a feature, not a bug.) They’re excellent, though you probably already guessed that, or at least you hoped. They may be compared somewhat to Lovecraft, but there is perhaps a better relationship to a more modern master, Clive Barker, who has none of the bigoted trappings of Lovecraft and whose view of madness and descent is stranger and more nuanced, as they are here. Though it’s also folly to try to compare John Hornor Jacobs to either author, because he, and his work, are singular. Without giving away too much, you will find two protagonists who—by a mix of situational happenstance and professional merit—find themselves in receipt of found history. In one, a woman meets a one-eyed, half-mad, bon vivant expat poet from a (fictional) country lost to a dictatorial regime, and she discovers not only his writings but his translations of a grotesque and forbidden work. It is a tale of resistance, both politically and personally, against an encroaching, sinister reality. In the other, a man besieged by love, loss, and lust finds—in the purview of working for the Library of Congress—century-old recordings of folk songs and murder ballads, which carry with them a deep and peculiar cost. It would be tempting to say that in each tale the characters unearth this found history, but that’s not exactly right. It’s that each piece of the discovered past has a kind of gravity to it—the translation is not simply a translation, not of Latin, not of deep holler blues. Rather, each is a labyrinth—or the center of a labyrinth—and the protagonists are doomed heroes compelled to walk the maze in order to find the monstrous heart of truth and authenticity. And in that walk, each character loses something of themselves, and gains something, too.

  The only questions are: What is lost? And what is gained?

  Does each lose a vital part of themselves, or are they discarding pieces that never truly belonged? Some trapping of civilization, some false bit of human pretense? Or is what they lose the thing that marked them as human, as part of this world and its cosmic order? Is it about their coming to terms with that or utterly destroying the balance? They lose emotional and intellectual pieces; they also lose physical parts of themselves. (Interior and exterior.) Are these sacrifices to a greater truth? Or prices to pay for sin?

  You’ll have to read the stories to find out.

  Again, they’re excellent novellas written by a storyteller and writer working at the top of his game.

  But enough about him; let’s talk about me.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to write this foreword. I hesitated. And the reason for that is woefully simple: I am fucking jealous as fuck of John Hornor Jacobs.

  Like, seriously. It is puzzling to me that his work hasn’t broken out yet in a major way—it should, and it will, because it’s just that good.

  Here’s the thing. I expect it is true of most writers that it gets harder and harder for us to read fiction because, simply put, we know how the sausage is made. We have internalized the beats. We can hum the tune even before it hits our ears. A story is a lot of front-facing artifice, and behind the scenes is a world of hidden architecture. Most readers don’t see and cannot detect that architecture, but writers and storytellers usually can and do (whether we want to or not). It’s not that it diminishes the experience or makes it seem amateurish—it’s just that it takes us out of the weird wonder of reading, a little bit. We’re too busy subtly detecting the seams or figuring out the magic tricks.

  But I can’t detect the seams in this man’s work.

  His magic tricks remain pure fucking magic.

  These murder ballads are ones we have not heard before.

  And god, I hate that. I love it! But I hate it. Because I read his work and he is so good, there’s no artifice, there’s no architecture, it’s just great storytelling. The kind of stories in which you lose yourself.

  The kind of stories that are, in their way, labyrinths all their own. Each a story with gravity. A story that compels.

  A story of descent.

  And that’s where I get it. It’s where I find myself relating to these characters—Isabel, in the one, and Cromwell, in the other—as people compelled by a narrative, pulled down into it. Lost to it, in a way. It’s hard not to read these two novellas without a similar feeling of maze walking, a wander into the dark. I’m Isabel, swept up in the narrative of The Eye and his journey, and his translations. I’m Cromwell, tying himself to the journals of Harlan Parker, lost in the hollers, searching for the crass modalities of “Stagger Lee.” Maybe they resist at first, but it gets them. It holds them, hooks them, drags them down.

  For me, at least, it’s a good thing. (I can’t necessarily say the same for the characters in these novellas; that’s for you to figure out.) My jealousy is a healthy one, thankfully. I feared I’d read these stories and want to take my own novel and chuck it in a ditch, because fuck it, I’ll never write like JHJ does. That last part is true, but unlike Isabel and Cromwell, I didn’t have to give up anything to read these stories and write this foreword. I’ve still got my jealousy of a writer and storyteller operating at the top of not just his game but all the damn games—but I’ve also got my work, too. I can aspire to be better than I am now. Like Isabel and Cromwell, wrestling with some vision of what came before and some reckoning of the now. Regarding the stories seen and heard, trying to find a way out and through.

  Maybe one day I, too, can writ
e like John Hornor Jacobs.

  All it’ll cost me is my eye, I’m told. And maybe my soul . . .

  —Chuck Wendig

  The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

  Interstitial

  There once was a time when poets were famous

  and their words could set whole countries aflame

  Epigraph

  I have walked in the mountains,

  And beneath the shadowed trees.

  I have touched the altars of night

  And will always carry them within me.

  Should you seal me away for a thousand years

  I will still remain there

  Eternally revived, steaming in the dark.

  I am an eon rising in man,

  I am a thousand tomorrowless days.

  —Guillermo Benedición, Nuestra Guerra Celestial, or Our Heavenly War

  The perception of time and the experience of being rooted in temporality becomes dilated during torture . . . Fernándes examines the relationship between spatial dissociation, chronological experience, and the subjectivity of memory. For those who experienced torture within the Pinochet regime, he explores not only how torture deconstructed the victim’s humanity, but how it lessened the torturer’s humanity as well, and, acting as proxy, the state’s . . .

  —Cristiána Reyes, The Rivers Flow Red to the Sea: State Violence in Chile and Magera

  1

  Málaga, Spain

  1987

  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 see. It hissed and murmured at us from beyond the Paseo Maritimo. At the time, I was teaching writing and poetry at the Universidad de Málaga. In the evenings I would ride my Vespa down to the park to catch a breeze from the sea, to drink in the cafés 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.

  We became used to the sight of each other. Him, a watchful yet benevolent Polyphemus, attired in rumpled linen suits and bright-colored shirts, ash-mottled at the cuffs. Me, a pale, bespectacled ghost, clad all in black despite the heat: dress, blouse, hat, hair, sunglasses. An affectation, I guess, toward the grave.

  For weeks, we engaged in what other people—other people who were not Mageran—might think of as a mating ritual. He would approach, face shadowed, newspaper tucked under his arm, and take a seat at another table, but always facing me—not too close, though never very far away. He crossed his legs and tilted his head so that his one good eye was directed toward me. He was a man who could make crossing his legs seem an outrageous indolence. When he would nod to me, it was as a king acknowledging a rival. Or a brother. There is very little difference between the two, after all. He seemed very familiar, not as if I had met him before, but as if I had seen him somewhere, in a play, or a television show. I resolved to speak with him and satisfy my curiosity.

  The night we finally spoke, though, it was not of my doing. Instead of observing me from afar, with only a nod, he approached and sat at my table without as much as a word of greeting, ordered a pisco, and turned disgruntled when the waitress apologized that they did not have any. I was so used to the sight of him by then, it was almost expected. There are a million allowances and rudenesses even the most banal man will permit himself. And The Eye was most definitely not ordinary. I put down my book and gave him my attention.

  “Coffee and fernet, then,” he said to the waitress, a little peevishly, after she assured him they had no pisco for him to drink with his coffee. His singular gaze returned to me. “Santaverde,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Las Palas, then. Most assuredly.”

  “No.”

  He frowned. I began to speak but he shushed me.

  “Concepción or nothing and nowhere.”

  “No. I am from Coronada.”

  “Ahh!” He raised a finger as if making a point in a philosopher’s salon. “I was very close!”

  “You were getting farther away with every guess.”

  “You are very acute,” he said.

  “They call you ‘The Eye’ around here. Did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “It is as good a name as any. Would you like to know my given name?”

  “I somewhat prefer ‘The Eye,’” I said.

  He laughed. I could see the silver fillings in his molars. When he was through, he gestured at my clothing. “Are you still in mourning?”

  The question startled me. I looked down at my garb and then back to him. “I didn’t think so, but—”

  “It was a trick question. As Magerans, we will always be in mourning.” He reached out and touched the cover of the book I was reading. It was Léon Felipe’s Goodbye, Panamá. “You are quite the bookworm, are you not? I always see you nose-down in some book or another.”

  I shrugged, used to intrusive men commenting on my studious nature. “I am a lecturer at the university.”

  “And what do you lecture about?”

  “Poetry. Modern South American writers. I teach composition to first-year students.”

  “Do you like your work?” The Eye asked.

  I might have been more taken aback if he had said, “Do you have a lover?” but not by much. It was such an intimate question for someone I had known—and to be fair, not actually known other than to say we’d seen each other—for such a short amount of time.

  “It is work,” I said. “We all have to work, do we not?”

  “There is work that tunnels inward. There is work that tunnels outward,” he said. His choice of words was quirky. I wanted to write down “tunnels” for later and think about why he might have used it.

  “My turn, now, for the—” I almost said “interrogation,” but stopped myself. There was a real chance that might not sit well with him. “Questions,” I finished, lamely.

  He withdrew a Bali cigarette and lit it, pluming clove-scented smoke into the air. Cars and pedestrians passed on the street. A mother with a squealing child. Lovers arm in arm. The summer sun had set and the air had cooled, still smelling of salt and sea. Later, musicians and dancers would busk in the streetlights, hoping for a drunken coin and a laugh. The Eye took a sip of fernet, then of coffee, and then a drag from his cigarette. He remained quiet.

  “What happened to your eye?” I asked.

  “It had seen too much,” he said. “So I plucked it out.”

  “Plucked?”

  “Removed it.”

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  “Am I?” he said. “Do you like the cinema?”

  “Of course. But I rarely have the money for it.”

  “Would you like to go to the cinema with me?” He drank his fernet down and shifted in his seat—the motions of a man preparing to depart. “My treat.”

  It was a sharp turn in the conversation. Maybe due to the complete and inadvertent honesty I gave to him when admitting my poverty.

  “Yes,” I said. I could not say I liked The Eye. I think I disliked him the way one dislikes a cousin or uncle. But he was interesting. And so familiar. We agreed on a meeting time.

  He stood, drained his coffee to its dregs. “I will be up all night now,” he said. He placed far too much money on the table. When I indicated it was ten times his share, he said, “Go, buy yourself a book. I’ve enough to spare. Allow me to spend my money on young women in ways that won’t get me chased out of town.”

  We were to meet at the same café the following ev
ening, a Sunday. Throughout the morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had met him or had seen him somewhere before, not in Spain. We met at the Café de Soto then and wandered to the Calle Frigiliana, where, at that time, there were many small cinemas and nightclubs. I was interested in Almodóvar’s La ley del deseo, but The Eye sniffed and on his insistence, we walked on to the Cinema la Playa, a run-down venue that played only Mexican films, mostly luchador and horror. He chose Veneno para las hadas—Poison for the Fairies—and led me into the atrium, where he bought us both beers and popcorn. The movie was a disjointed story of two little girls becoming initiated into the powers of witchcraft, and it did not end well. The Eye laughed raucously at inappropriate moments, making me nervous. When one of the children locked the other in a barn and set it ablaze, he hawed like a donkey. I thought he might be choking.

  Afterward, we had drinks at “our” café.

  “Well, what did you think?”

  “Gruesome,” I said. “I don’t understand how you can enjoy such fare, with all we’ve been through.”

  He fixed me with his stare, surprisingly more powerful with one eye than two. For all that, I could tell he was in a good mood, but he did not intend to apologize or be cowed at his enjoyment of the film. “You do not know what I’ve been through,” he said. “And I do not know what you’ve suffered. There is a beyond to every woman and man. There is a beneath. There will always be misery in the world. Right now, countless children are dying.” He gestured at the city around us. “Some even here. Each night could be the end of all nights.” He looked up at the canopy of trees wreathing the café’s outdoor seating area. It was a faraway look with a faraway eye, like the Rolling Stones song that a girlfriend used to always sing me in broken English when I was in school in Buenos Aires. Marcia Alavedes, her name was. I had not thought of her in a long time. She had been a total disaster, but sometimes I missed her, as one does with fondly remembered mistakes. I missed her mostly at night or when I wanted to clean the smell of Málaga from my nose. She used to take me on long motorcycle rides in the countryside; in those moments, arms around her stomach as we barreled down Argentinian highways, head pressed to her strong back, cocooned in the sound of motor and wind, she was something wondrous. But when the movement stopped, she was a figurative wreck. The Eye simply looked up at the trees as if witnessing some dawning and not wholly welcome vista. “Misery is a condition that we are all promised,” he continued. “On the screen, painted in light, that misery is very small.” He made his fingers dance on the table. “Little witches! Next time, we will go see wrestlers fighting vampires and maybe you’ll understand.”