Echo
From the Author of HEX
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
'Echo is a compulsive page turner mixing supernatural survival horror and pulp adventure' Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts
'Hallucinatory, eerie and terrifying' Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street
'Echo is a haunting contribution to the literature of folk horror' Ramsey Campbell
'The most frightening opening scene ever written' The Guardian
It's One Thing to Lose Your Life
It's Another to Lose Your Soul
Travel journalist and mountaineer Nick Grevers awakes from a coma to find that his climbing buddy, Augustin, is missing and presumed dead. Nick's own injuries are as extensive as they are horrifying. His face wrapped in bandages and unable to speak, Nick claims amnesia - but he remembers everything.
He remembers how he and Augustin were mysteriously drawn to the Maudit, a remote and scarcely documented peak in the Swiss Alps. He remembers an ominous sense that they were not alone. He remembers something waiting for them . . .
Sam Avery wants to be glad that Nick is alive and coming home, but the accident has stirred up memories that Sam thought were long buried. Soon he realizes that it isn't just the trauma of the accident that haunts Nick. Something has awakened inside of him, something that endangers the lives of everyone around him . . .
'This is totally, brilliantly original'
Stephen King, on HEX
'Creepy and girpping and original'
George R. R. Martin on HEX
'Reminiscent of vintage Stephen King'
John Connolly on HEX
'The next genre superstar'
Paul Cornell
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olde Heuvelt (Hex) loads this smart tale of a young man's dehumanization with extravagant horror tropes while expertly avoiding cliché. By the time Swiss rescuers reach stranded mountaineer Nick Grevers, his face has been horrifically mutilated and his climbing partner, Augustin, has gone missing. Sam Avery, Nick's lover, struggles to cope with the suggestion that whatever happened on the mountain was no accident, while Nick wonders whether he's becoming a monster as he tries to understand why he and Augustin felt compelled to climb the innocent-looking little peak of Le Maudit in the first place. As Nick's violent impulses slowly overtake him post-rescue, he worries that he may now embody Le Maudit's "old and dangerous" soul. Sam, meanwhile, investigates what happened to Nick and to others who have strayed too close to Le Maudit—including the 32 people who died violently at the hospital where Nick recuperates and all those who've committed suicide since. Olde Heuvelt expertly contrasts Nick's somber desperation and Sam's desperate optimism to create a moving narrative that stops just short of going over the top. Horror fans will be thrilled.
