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A review by megapolisomancy
Echo Lake by Letitia Trent
3.0
A Weird Place novel about the titular lake, an engineered body of water which drowned an earlier iteration of Heartshorne, Oklahoma and has continued to have a bad reputation ever since. I was expecting a Charles L. Grant-esque work of quiet horror, but this was more of a Southern-gothic-by-way-of-the-Midwest focusing on family trauma and small-town secrets, with splashes of regular old horror intruding to allow Trent to meditate on the differences between random and “redemptive” violence.
Our protagonist Emily Collins, living a soulless and repetitious life in Ohio, finds herself newly single at 30. We’re told at first that this relationship had lasted five years and began when she was in college, which never really added up with the other stories we get about her life, but later we’re told the relationship lasted ten years. This isn’t a slippery, unreliable narrative, though, but just the most glaring of the sloppy mistakes that surface throughout this work, which also includes an astonishing number of typos. As a material artifact, this book is quite visually striking, but it seems the publisher might have spent their proofreading budget on the art department. This is too bad, because Trent (who I believe has mostly published poetry prior to this) has a beautiful way with language, even if the choice to omit quotation marks seems like a somewhat self-conscious way to assert this book’s literary (as opposed to genre) bona fides.
Emily, at any rate, is rather emotionally stunted/needy after a chaotic childhood spent unmoored and constantly moving, due to some unspecified trauma her single mother suffered during her own chaotic childhood in Heartshorne. When her great aunt dies and leaves her a house in Heartshorne, she decides this is her chance to figure out what happened to drive her family out of the town, and to make a more meaningful home/community for herself. Emily is the central POV through the book, but in the first section she is interspersed with chapters centered on various locals coming under the influence of the lake, in the second with flashbacks to her mother’s childhood, and in the third with Levi Richardson, the closeted local pastor who tries to bring Emily into his flock. Of those counterpoints, the first two were the weakest parts of the book - around halfway through I was sick of reading about random characters stabbing, slashing, or crushing other random characters, and the mother’s storyline went exactly where I didn’t want it to. Levi’s, on the other hand, worked because he was an actually developed character, and helped to tie in the wonderful climax of the novel.
This novel is an interesting counterpoint to Kiernan’s _The Red Tree_ (a newly-single woman relocates to the countryside and muses on loneliness and isolation while beset by long-running local weirdnesses) , and while I liked the voice of this one more, I think the Kiernan might stick with me longer - I can’t say why, exactly (maybe the metafictive/unreliable aspects of _The Red Tree_?), because I did enjoy this book, but that's my gut feeling.
Our protagonist Emily Collins, living a soulless and repetitious life in Ohio, finds herself newly single at 30. We’re told at first that this relationship had lasted five years and began when she was in college, which never really added up with the other stories we get about her life, but later we’re told the relationship lasted ten years. This isn’t a slippery, unreliable narrative, though, but just the most glaring of the sloppy mistakes that surface throughout this work, which also includes an astonishing number of typos. As a material artifact, this book is quite visually striking, but it seems the publisher might have spent their proofreading budget on the art department. This is too bad, because Trent (who I believe has mostly published poetry prior to this) has a beautiful way with language, even if the choice to omit quotation marks seems like a somewhat self-conscious way to assert this book’s literary (as opposed to genre) bona fides.
Emily, at any rate, is rather emotionally stunted/needy after a chaotic childhood spent unmoored and constantly moving, due to some unspecified trauma her single mother suffered during her own chaotic childhood in Heartshorne. When her great aunt dies and leaves her a house in Heartshorne, she decides this is her chance to figure out what happened to drive her family out of the town, and to make a more meaningful home/community for herself. Emily is the central POV through the book, but in the first section she is interspersed with chapters centered on various locals coming under the influence of the lake, in the second with flashbacks to her mother’s childhood, and in the third with Levi Richardson, the closeted local pastor who tries to bring Emily into his flock. Of those counterpoints, the first two were the weakest parts of the book - around halfway through I was sick of reading about random characters stabbing, slashing, or crushing other random characters, and the mother’s storyline went exactly where I didn’t want it to. Levi’s, on the other hand, worked because he was an actually developed character, and helped to tie in the wonderful climax of the novel.
This novel is an interesting counterpoint to Kiernan’s _The Red Tree_ (a newly-single woman relocates to the countryside and muses on loneliness and isolation while beset by long-running local weirdnesses) , and while I liked the voice of this one more, I think the Kiernan might stick with me longer - I can’t say why, exactly (maybe the metafictive/unreliable aspects of _The Red Tree_?), because I did enjoy this book, but that's my gut feeling.