A young girl, Julia, trapped in a snowbound chalet in a mountainous area of Switzerland, is under attack by ghostly apparitions. Her brother, Sam, rushing to save her, is struggling through unnatural levels of snow on roads closed to all traffic but a snow plough. Her brother’s boyfriend, Nick, horrifically scarred after an ‘accident’ on a mountaineering expedition is missing and believed to be a danger to himself and others. This sounds like a fairly classical format for a psychological thriller or a horror story, but in this instance it appears to be both. Nick has becomes obsessed with climbing The Maurit, a peak deep in the Swiss Alps about which there is little information other than allusions to suspicious and secretive villagers’ tales that no one who has tried to climb it has ever returned. During the climb, strange delusions affect him and his partner, Antoine. The latter disappears, presumed dead, and Nick returns with a massive wound across his face.
I said this was a combination of psychological thriller and horror, this is why:
Both Nick and Sam had traumatic experiences of mountains at an early age, which led Nick to become a risk-taking climber and Sam to have an abiding fear of climbing. These different psychologies colour the way the story evolves. When Nick returns he is supernaturally possessed by the mountain and, when his attempts at control fail and the Maudit breaks through, he become a monster and mass murderer. The horror elements are well written, though somewhat formulaic, and the mountain climbing sequences are clearly written by someone with experience. It is a cross between ‘Touching the Void’ and a Lovecraftian Cthulhu tale, with the mountain as an elder cosmic god.
The book is written as a series of first person narratives, mostly by Nick and Sam, interspersed with quotations from Horror stories from the past, particularly by H. P. Lovecraft, who was obviously a major influence. In the past I have read all of HP’s oeuvre and can feel little touches throughout. I think the translator, Moshe Gilula, deserves applause for what must have been a challenging effort to turn Dutch horror based language into English/American horror based language.
I would like to thank NetGalley, the publishers and the author for providing me with a draft proof copy for the purpose of this review.

I haven't read Hex but this is a standalone. I realised pretty quickly that this was not going to be for me. The opening scene is scary but then the rest of the book is drawn out and I actually found it hard to keep my interest. The language is bizarre at times. Is this how the kids are talking nowadays? The story of the mountain and the curse which was why I wanted to read this was lost in a blizzard of overwriting, youth speak and a storyline that flitted back and forth more than a bee on speed.

Wow! This book was absolutely fantastic. I was drawn in from the start and didn’t stop until I was done. Can not wait for more by author.

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 major 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 deflated like a slow puncture with the plodding narrative.

Echo opens with the strongest and only genuinely creepy scene in the entire novel and then takes an ice age circling back to it towards the end before terminally nosediving. 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 sitting 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 seriously held back by long-winded pages which droned on and 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, loss of looks 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 Echoes, 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.

Each of the chapters is named after the author’s favourite writers, the first being Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, then The Invisible Man and Stephen King’s Misery. If this was a better book then this might have been a nice idea, however, for the most part it comes across as self-indulgent as everything quoted is significantly better than Echo.

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 that has seen better days. 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 major disappointment.

Having read and listened (I am greedy) to Hex I have been waiting for this book with baited breath (ok with anticipation at the very least) it’s not at all what I expected but this does not detract from what is a very good work of fiction, I am not going to give spoilers or regurgitate the synopsis which a lot of reviewers seem to do, read and enjoy