BOOK REVIEW: ECHO BY THOMAS OLDE HEUVELT

A HORRIFIC SKIING INCIDENT BLENDS INTO A SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY: BOOK REVIEW: ECHO BY THOMAS OLDE HEUVELT

28/2/2022

I was a massive fan of Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s breakthrough English language debut Hex (2016) and was looking forward to his next release, but ultimately found his follow up Echo to be a disappointment. This novel was a real trudge to finish, mirroring the fateful climb of main character Nick Grevers on the peak of the Maudit mountain (in the Alps) which the main plot is built around. Nick scales the mountain, a guy in his mid-twenties prime, but when he is introduced to the reader is a broken man, physically changed forever, but how did he get this way is the big question the novel asks? But by the time you reach page-200 you might not care either way how his face was disfigured, I certainly did not, as all suspense deflates like a slow puncture hampered by a plodding narrative.

Echo opens with the strongest and one of the few genuinely creepy scenes in the entire novel and subsequently takes an ice age circling back to it towards the end. A young woman wakes up and finds a number of people standing stock still in her room ominously staring at her, which was seriously freaky. When she blinks they have moved closer (I’m sure this also happened in an episode of Doctor Who), feeling terrified and threatened, soon the closest of the group are lurking upon her bed. This was a killer opening, but such moments were very few and far between with the author instead using incredibly slow very drawn-out pace which heads to a predictable and anti-climactic ending. If ever a book needed a ruthless editor to streamline the plot, this was it.

The core premise of Echo had promise but was hampered by long-winded pages which droned on and on with narrative circles which went nowhere. Climber Nick Grevers is brought back from the mountains after a terrible accident which mutilated his face and his climbing partner is lost, presumed lost. Suspicion falls on whether what happened to Nick was an accident, or whether he had any knowledge of the fate of the companion climber. Soon it becomes obvious that Nick is not the same person, psychologically broken, good looks gone, he begins to experience weird stuff that suggests he has brought something back with him from the mountain.

The story is told in both Nick’s voice and his boyfriend Sam Avery who also has to deal with the fallout of the horrific injury and the disappearance of the good looks of his lover. A few years younger than Nick, Sam struggles to cope with his partner’s mood swings and the fact that a brief look underneath Nick’s mummified face reveals that this might not be the guy he fell in love with. Faced with a dilemma, does he abandon his partner and return to America or stick it out with a guy who is fast becoming a stranger? The longer he hangs on the more certain he is that there is something more than physical afflicting Nick and begins an investigation which runs through a fair bit of Echo.

I found the supernatural aspect of the story ponderous and the author fails to recreate the eerily superb sense of time and place which made Hex so memorable. Hex featured a town which was forever cursed and connected to an eternal witch they had once wronged and Thomas Olde Heuvelt tries to pull off the same trick with the mountain and surrounding areas in Echo, but it falls flat and quickly becomes repetitive and rather than ominous the mountain just becomes boring.

I felt little liking or empathy towards either Nick or Sam and when the reader cares little for the central characters a novel is always going to struggle to connection. Both were whiney, flat, self-centred and for the most part unlikable and I had zero investment in what happened to either of them. However, there were some unsettling moments where Sam was trying his best to hide the yuck factor when the bandaged Nick was cuddling up close to him.

The language, this might have been a translation issue, also tested my patience and the use of abbreviations or youth slang (for lack of a better word) grated and I found this to be both inconsistent and lazy. According to my Kindle search facility the word ‘cuz’ was used 99 times (it felt like more) so why was this text-speak word used so frequently? The book was not written in any kind of a dialect so these words jarred, even though it was predominately in Sam’s voice, it became distracting.

Part of the reason Echo felt so drawn out was the continual jumping backwards and forwards in time to the events leading up to the point Nick had the accident, to other passages where we are reading his laptop thoughts. All of this led to a really messy and disjointed reading experience and even though there were a few nice moments on the mountain, such as when they realised they were at an impossible height, the climb still dragged on way too long and the narratives became confusing.
If you were a fan of Hex read this and make your own mind up, however, it is not a book I would recommend. It was painfully slow and drawn out, repetitive, populated with unlikable characters and a derivative supernatural story which failed to convince. Hell, if you want to read a scary horror story set on a mountain check out the Gabriel Dylan’s YA novel Whiteout, it has considerably more action, gore and thrills than this disappointment.

Tony Jones

Echo: From the Author of HEX
by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

It's One Thing to Lose Your Life
It's Another to Lose Your Soul

When climber Nick Grevers is brought down from the mountains after a terrible accident he has lost his looks, his hopes and his climbing companion. His account of what happened on the forbidden peak of the Maudit is garbled, almost hallucinogenic. Soon it becomes apparent more than his shattered body has returned: those that treat his disfigured face begin experiencing extraordinary and disturbing psychic events that suggest that Nick has unleashed some ancient and primal menace on his ill-fated expedition.

Nick's partner Sam Avery has a terrible choice to make. He fell in love with Nick's youth, vitality and beauty. Now these are gone and all that is left is a haunted mummy-worse, a glimpse beneath the bandages can literally send a person insane.

Sam must decide: either to flee to America, or to take Nick on a journey back to the mountains, the very source of the curse, the little Alpine Village of Grimnetz, its soul-possesed Birds of Death and it legends of human sacrifice and, ultimately, its haunted mountain, the Maudit.

Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt is a Hugo Award Winner and has been hailed as the future of speculative fiction in Europe. His work combines a unique blend of popular culture and fairy-tale myth that is utterly unique. Echo follows his sensational debut English language novel, HEX.