Book Review: Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (2022)
Tor Nightfire
(This review contains minor spoilers.)
Thome Olde Heuvelt’s Echo is the author’s second novel translated into English, and one I’ve been waiting years to read. His supremely excellent HEX (Tor, 2013) ranks among the five greatest horror novels in my mind, and my expectations were sky-high when I sat down to read Echo on the day it was published. I’m now looking forward to his next novel, Oracle, with just as much fervor.
City Lights and Alpine Heights
The story opens with a frantic young woman trapped in a Swiss chalet while silent ghosts gradually close in on her, drawing nearer each time she looks away. With a nearly-dead phone, she makes a desperate call to her brother, Sam, who at that moment is following a snowplow up the mountain. Naturally, he doesn’t make it in time, and the scene closes on a dark note that sets the tone for the remainder of the novel. It’s one of the strongest and most memorable scenes I’ve encountered in a horror story, and it holds in the memory even months after finishing the book.
From here we go back, not to the young woman but to the man she desperately called: Sam is a twenty-something New Yorker, cosmopolitan and infinitely comfortable in his worldly existence. Living in Amsterdam with his poster-perfect boyfriend, Nick, Sam has carved out a comfortable existence that is finally maturing: he is deeply in love with his partner, they’ve settled down, and we’re seeing the green shoots of maturation in this character who might initially come off as vapid or shallow (but is ultimately neither). The only fly in the ointment is Nick's passion for Alpine mountaineering, an interest deeply antithetical to Sam’s urban-dweller identity which frequently puts his lover out of touch for extended periods.
Yet, when love is real, we all learn to make room for our beloved’s interests, and thus Sam finds himself regularly wishing Nick a safe return before he goes off to test his mettle in the Alps. It is this challenge that hinges at the center of Echo, and the one that ultimately sends both Sam and Nick down a path from which they can never return. Sam receives a call saying that Nick has been hospitalized after a terrible accident, and a short flight later, finds his boyfriend bedridden in a small Swiss clinic. Nick, his face now unspeakably mangled beneath the hospital wrappings, passes a note to the nurse saying that there was no accident on the mountain, as well as more cryptic messages. Soon the nurse in question quits the clinic, and the attending physician commits suicide.
Sam retreats to New York while Nick is transferred to a major hospital in Amsterdam, where shortly thereafter a strange incident results in the death of a large group of people. In time, Nick is discharged and Sam returns to reconcile with him, only Nick is not himself: he spends long hours in the basement, pouring over mountain maps and talking to himself in the dark. He refuses to remove his bandages–on which he has drawn a crude smile in black marker–and rarely seems in control of himself. He refuses to speak in any detail about what happened in the Amsterdam hospital or the accident that put him there. Then, one night, Sam awakens to discover that Nick has wrapped his face in wire, and what lies beneath the bandages has no earthly business in their home.
In time, Nick and Sam reconcile, and seek to augment Nick’s healing by returning to the Alps and facing the trauma he experienced among the frozen peaks. Only the mountain where his injury occurred seems to be wrapped in mystery, receiving scant mention in local histories despite its opulent presence, and the residents of the alpine town are suitably wary of the outsiders enquiring about what lies at the edge of their valley. From here, Echo goes full-throttle into nightmare territory.
Peeling Back the Layers
Echo is a really solid work on the topline-the story is interesting, the prose is solid, the characters are vibrant and the plot is sensible and satisfying–but there’s something incongruous that hides in the pages, much like the evil at the heart of the plot.
I think horror readers instinctively understand haunted places. We read stories about burial grounds, caves, battlefields, and moors that are lousy with evil spirits or the ghosts of those who have lived there before, but the idea of a haunted place being a mountain–and one in the Alps no less–was something I both loved and struggled with. While it seemed a touch unlikely that such a well-traveled area would hold the secret it does, I eventually found myself ultimately won-over by the idea that there was a haunted mountain that was coincidentally ignored by most of the travelers to the area.
Apart from how genuinely scary it can be, one of the strongest elements is its main character. I loved Sam: he was real, layered and interesting. That said, I was puzzled by his decision-making at times, electing to run from the core plot of in moments where I wasn't quite able to recognize a clear purpose in the storytelling. It’s almost like Heuvelt put an extra degree of effort in envisioning how the character would deal with the bizarreness of the story, and this produced a push-pull in the narrative that resulted in long digressions. It’s not necessarily bad storytelling, but it did feel slightly befuddling as a reader.
Echo is a strange novel, at once shockingly deep in some of its execution and cumbersomely complex in the way it unfolds. It’s an unusual method of storytelling for the genre, wherein past and present are asynchronously revealed and some scenes unfold on the page while others are only recounted at later instances. I think this is probably the single largest barrier to readers, and while I consider myself pretty adaptable when it comes to things like story structure, I did experience moments of disorientation following the narrative, especially early on. While these all resolved in time, I think readers should be prepared, as was the case with HEX, to wander in darkness a bit.
Return to Base Camp
Though it’s not quite up to the brilliance of HEX, which falls in true lightning-in-a-bottle territory, Echo is a very solid novel that carries many moments of genuine creepiness. While the story meanders a little bit in the middle, with Sam chasing down a few too many dead-ends and red herrings for my taste, but the ambitious central narrative and excellently-written characters make this something to overlook.
If you’re the type of reader that can handle a bit of narrative discomfort, and are willing to hold your questions until the author is ready to answer them, I think Echo offers an exceptional and memorable reading experience that will impress fans of literary and popular horror alike.
Score:8.1/10
Strengths:
Excellent main character
The Swiss Alps are a unique and effective setting for supernatural horror
Genuinely creepy antagonist
Weaknesses
While good, the translation isn’t flawless
Plot meanders a bit, at least compared to most North American horror novels, particularly in the middle
Some characters seem extraneous
You can purchase a copy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, through a book shop in your community.
You may also like: HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; Abominable by Dan Simmons
