[Book Rec] Echo - Thomas Olde Heuvelt
May. 15th, 2022 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoJust finished reading Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. This is a horror novel in which the general premise is "Mountain climber gets injured while on a remote peak in the Alps, and is Not Quite Right when he returns home". People who encounter him start to have mysterious symptoms typically associated with altitude sickness... And that's just the half of it.
Very creepy and atmospheric; I really enjoyed it. Lots of landscape-related horror, but also lots of what I can only describe as "landscape fucking". Or like. Eroticised geography. Conflation with person and landscape, and also the person is the landscape, and this is done in a sexy (or sexy-creepy) way. It's something I encounter occasionally in certain fandoms (ahem) but rarely in published fiction. Whatever you call it, there was a lot of it.
Also, there's an M/M relationship at the centre of this, but it's not a romance story - it's more like those horror stories where one half of the couple is possessed (or a werewolf or something) and the other half sticks by them and tries to find a way to exorcise the ghost or cure lycanthropy or whatever. It's that, but with two guys. Which I don't see often, especially not when I pick up something at random rather than specifically looking for LGBT novels, so that was nice!
It doesn't quite stick the landing - the ending was very handwavey, and kind of vague in many places - but I enjoyed it so much that I don't mind. The stuff that I hoped would happen did happen, so at least there's that. And "the ending wasn't great compared to the rest of it" is so common in horror that I just kind of shrug about it at this point. Come to think of it, in terms of structure, I don't like the way the beginning is done, either - it does that thing where it drops you into the middle of action for a chapter, and then jumps back to the actual beginning of the story. Bit of a mood whiplash. However, I was so curious to find out what on earth was happening, I just had to keep going - so, I guess it succeeded in drawing me in, even if I'm not always a fan of that format.
The above paragraph sure sounds picky, but still - I really did enjoy this novel a lot.
Very creepy and atmospheric; I really enjoyed it. Lots of landscape-related horror, but also lots of what I can only describe as "landscape fucking". Or like. Eroticised geography. Conflation with person and landscape, and also the person is the landscape, and this is done in a sexy (or sexy-creepy) way. It's something I encounter occasionally in certain fandoms (ahem) but rarely in published fiction. Whatever you call it, there was a lot of it.
Also, there's an M/M relationship at the centre of this, but it's not a romance story - it's more like those horror stories where one half of the couple is possessed (or a werewolf or something) and the other half sticks by them and tries to find a way to exorcise the ghost or cure lycanthropy or whatever. It's that, but with two guys. Which I don't see often, especially not when I pick up something at random rather than specifically looking for LGBT novels, so that was nice!
It doesn't quite stick the landing - the ending was very handwavey, and kind of vague in many places - but I enjoyed it so much that I don't mind. The stuff that I hoped would happen did happen, so at least there's that. And "the ending wasn't great compared to the rest of it" is so common in horror that I just kind of shrug about it at this point. Come to think of it, in terms of structure, I don't like the way the beginning is done, either - it does that thing where it drops you into the middle of action for a chapter, and then jumps back to the actual beginning of the story. Bit of a mood whiplash. However, I was so curious to find out what on earth was happening, I just had to keep going - so, I guess it succeeded in drawing me in, even if I'm not always a fan of that format.
The above paragraph sure sounds picky, but still - I really did enjoy this novel a lot.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.