Echoes (Echoes, 1) - Softcover

Smith, Roger Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936097095 ISBN 13: 9781936097098

Publisher: Baobab Press, 2018

Synopsis

Roger Arthur Smith’s spectacular debut, Echoes, asks, what happens when your fundamental nature is challenged, not by the many evils without, but by an unexpected awakening within?

It’s 1960 in Hawthorne, Nevada, a desert town so secluded that the U.S. Navy stores munitions nearby. While the Cold war lumbers on, the town’s gossip mills and marriage-eligible bachelors and bachelorettes play a game of cat and mouse, a pastime, that if nothing else, manages to while away the hours. Attorney Will Dubykky keeps a watchful eye over Hawthorne, and it comes as no surprise that his interest is piqued by the sudden appearance of a strange boy. Why is this boy disfigured? Why does he have difficulty speaking? Why can’t some people seem to see him? As one of the initiated, Dubykky has an inkling; the boy is evil, an echo sent to rectify the wrongs of an indulgent murderer. The echo’s mission? Tempt, trap and eliminate the human monster that spawned it. If all goes according to evil’s intent, the echo will die fulfilling its destiny. This fatal sequence has persisted as long as evil itself, but before the dark circle can be closed, riddles must be solved. In a town this small, who is capable of committing a string of heinous crimes undetected? And, when the time comes will this echo, more naïve and innocent than any echo Dubykky has ever encountered, fulfill its gruesome destiny? Echoes, is a wildly entertaining, gloriously absorbing exploration of humanity, evil, and the stark environs in which both exist.

About this title

About the Author:

Roger Arthur Smith passed much of his youth riding in the back seat of the family station wagon driving through Hawthorne an the surrounding Nevada desert. He's worked professionally for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Nevada Magazine, and Carson City bureau of the Associated Press. He and his wife make their home in Portland, OR.

Review:

"Part 1950s noir novel and part spellbinding fantasy, Echoes sets the banality of evil against the milieu of a desolate, small-town life, a battle that is both intricate and fundamental, both for humanity and for echoes, the offspring of evil come to rectify the past. Smith takes the reader into a world that is both familiar yet mysterious, and one in which evil is all too real. Roger Arthur Smith’s prose combines the tension of the old noir writers with the imagination of modern fantasy writers. The result is a story that is both delightfully eerie and terrifyingly familiar, and the further you delve into it, the harder it is to escape." --William Todd Seabrook, editor of the Cupboard Pamphlet and the author of This Semi-Perfect Universe and The Genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer. (William Todd Seabrook)

About this edition

• Publisher: Baobab Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1936097095
• ISBN 13: 9781936097098
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 307