Echo

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

[pamela]

Given how much I loved Hex, I desperately wanted to love Echo, Heuvelt's second book to be translated into English. While it had moments of beautiful prose and was, at times, wonderfully atmospheric, this one just didn't really grab me.

Echo had a rough beginning. It didn't immediately grab me, and sometimes the translation felt clunky. From the outset, my impression of the book was skewed. Despite picking up at around the 10% mark as the atmosphere and mystery began to build, my initial impression stayed with me, making the rest of the book sadly underwhelming.

The characters were interesting, and the concept was strong, but Echo's big problem was that it was at least twice as long as it should have been. By the halfway mark, the plot began to plod and feel repetitive. There was only so much mileage we could get out of what is, fundamentally, a straightforward horror plot. Nothing wrong with simplicity - but because of the book's length, it just didn't deliver on that simplicity in a way that felt satisfying. Quite frankly, I was bored for at least half the time I spent reading it.

I would love to read Heuvelt's work in his native Dutch, as I feel like there was probably a lot missing in the translation. At times, the book felt overly simplistic, with odd little shortening quirks that felt unnatural in English but might have worked in Dutch. When I speak German, the diminutives I use naturally with friends and family work in the context of that language but come across as childish or trite if I try to use them with friends or family in English. Echo had little moments like that when I just couldn't get past how jarring some of the language choices felt. Translating fiction is a thankless task, and I don't envy those who have to do it - there's simply no way to please everyone. And not reading Dutch, I have absolutely no basis of comparison for how it reads compared to the original - this is just the impression I got where things just read as a little "off" for lack of a better word.

I would have rated Echo a bit higher for the concept and atmosphere. It wasn't a terrible book by any stretch, but I certainly didn't connect with it in a way that I often do with horror novels. While the book had a general air of spookiness and a fright-adjacent ambience, Echo's extreme length made it feel more boring and meandering than it should have.