If anyone was wondering if the hype that surrounded the publication in English of 'HEX' by the Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt was justified, this should satisfy them that it is. For all that 'HEX' was a Stephen King kind of story and 'Echo' is an H. P. Lovecraft story channelled through the gothic, albeit told in ways that subvert what you're expecting; he has a singular voice and he's telling these stories in a unique way that demonstrate how he's a writer of serious power. I'm intrigued as to what's next.
'Echo' is a seriously ambitious work that could be summed up by the challenge of "What if a man could be possessed by a mountain?" It's flawed, surely too meandering and too long, but that's appropriate in its way, given the subject matter. The central character is Nick, an avid young mountain climber with a particular fondness for the Alps who finds himself when there's nothing around but ice and beauty and what's inside his head. The spark to our story is that he also finds something else during one of his climbs, a mountain called the Maudit almost hidden away from the world with the few who know that it exists seemingly happy to help it hide.
Once he catches a glimpse of it, he's smitten. He has to climb it and he does so, with a mountaineering friend named Augustin. And, as we quickly find out in a patchwork story told in very non-linear fashion, Augustin never came back from the Maudit. Nick did, but he returned changed by his experience and he may have brought something dark back with him, perhaps the essence of mountain itself. While the opening chapter, featuring his sister, Julia, is creepy in the extreme, a neatly nightmarish opening, it takes us a long while for Heuvelt to acknowledge that he's writing a horror novel. It initially seems to be a drama, of a man coming to terms with a traumatic experience, of a man coming to terms with the past that he's submerged, and of a man coming to terms with his own loss of beauty, now that his face is gone, replaced by an Invisible Man-esque swathe of bandages.
And, while it may lose horror fans because it takes so long to get to where it's going, I believe readers who stay the course, who have the dedication to reach the top of the literary mountain, as it were, will be rewarded. While it's a love story at heart, albeit a very strange and horrific one, both between two human beingsNick and his lover, a shallow young man called Samand between a human being and the intangiblenot only a particular mountain but mountains in general and the call of the void that they representit finds horrific territory indeed. There are a few showcase scenes that deliver.
There are things that I didn't like, but most of them make sense in the context of the story, most to do with Sam. I quickly realised that I liked Nick, even if he's done terrible things and may well have worse coming in the future, but I didn't like Sam at all. He's all surface and no substance. He runs away from responsibility. He's self-centered and he's petty. I couldn't connect to him as a character, not because he's gay but because he's so shallow that he's brand-obsessed. He just has to have a Ted Baker bag, for instance. I don't even know what that is but I know I don't want one. I connected far more with Nick in a bunch of ways, even though he's presented as a sort of monster, but I still got that Sam is the way he is to provide a contrast, a challenge and a serious opportunity for growth. I didn't like him at all but I understood why he had to be the way he was.
The only thing I didn't understand was the annoying use of colloquialisms in a novel that's deliberately literary in outlook, a nod back to Victorian gothics. The narrative is collated from multiple and varied sources, like 'Dracula' or 'The Call of Cthulhu'. It was written in Dutch and then translated into English, but there are still sections, often dialogue, in Dutch, French, German, Italian and even Japanese, an approach not uncommon in the Victorian era. Each chapter begins with a quote from a famous novel, often a gothic or a modern gothic. And yet there's a frequent use of "hadda" and "cuzza" as if they're real English words. I don't know if that was Heuvelt's idea or that of his translator, Moshe Gilula, but I absolutely despised it.
But what did I like about the book? Well, its moods have really stayed with me, as I realised when I put virtual pen to paper a couple of months after reading it, ironically for a mountaineering horror novel mostly at 35,000 feet, as I flew like Sam from the US to the UK. I don't remember many of the details that I found important at the time, enough to jot them down as notes, but I remember the sweep of the book, the feel of it, the creepiness that seeps into it like damp into walls. I remember the abiding cold that I felt during the mountaineering scenes. I remember the freakiness of the Alpine village in which Sam and Nick encounter the death birds.
I remember, too, the fear that almost cripples Sam in the early stages of the book, both at what Nick's become and of his own response to it. He's breezed through life without a care but he's suddenly hit with a massive change and he has to seriously examine who he is. On Nick's side, I also remember how Lovecraftian the book is in its grand sweep, that quintessential story arc where a character discovers something he (and maybe mankind) is not supposed to know about, researches it and obsesses over it and eventually suffers because of it, perhaps all the way to the point of madness. Oh yes, I remember the madness!
I think it's fair to say that I remember 'HEX' in a similar way. It's been half a decade since I read it, so I'm not remembering specific characters or specific things that happen, but I remember the feel of it all well. I remember the claustrophobia of being trapped inside a village that nobody could physically leave. I remember the weird acceptance of an old and bizarre apparition that shows up on a definable schedule. I also remember the frustration of all these people having no control over any of it, and by extension, no control over their lives, especially as change comes and their routine with it.
It's a skilled writer who can make us feel and a very skilled writer who can make what we feel reading their work stay with us so that we can recall those feelings a couple of months or half a decade later. I find myself seriously impressed with his talents. However that doesn't necessarily translate (ha!) into books that people will enjoy; some of the best literature ever written just isn't much fun at all. I found that I enjoyed 'HEX' a lot, though parts of the horror community find it overrated. I didn't enjoy 'Echo' as much but it grew on me as it developed, albeit almost like a tumour.
Even early on, I never wanted to stop reading, but I did stretch the experience out, as if wanting to find a reason to continue. It was almost the opposite of a book that kept me up at night turning pages. The further I got, though, the more I needed to know exactly how things would turn out. Just like Nick and the Maudit, it caught me and kept me. And suddenly, a quarter of the way in, all hell breaks loose and birds fly out of Nick's unwrapped face and there's no going back. We have to stay the course and reach the top of the mountain to conquer this story. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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