Lost Echoes [Paperback]

Joe R. Lansdale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

Since a mysterious childhood illness, Harry Wilkes has experienced horrific visions. Gruesome scenes emerge to replay themselves before his eyes. Triggered by simple sounds, these visions occur anywhere a tragic event has happened. Now in college, Harry feels haunted and turns to alcohol to dull his visionary senses. One night, he sees a fellow drunk easily best three muggers. In this man, Harry finds not only a friend that will help him kick the booze, but also a sensei who will teach him to master his unusual gift. Soon Harry’s childhood crush, Kayla, comes and asks for help solving her father’s murder. Unsure of how it will affect him, Harry finds the strength to confront the dark secrets of the past, only to unveil the horrors of the present.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this superior East Texas crime thriller from Stoker-winner Lansdale (Sunset and Sawdust), Harry Wilkes discovers after a severe childhood ear infection that he has a peculiar "hindsight." Harry can not only see dead people but see and hear violent events as they occurred in the recent or distant past. "It's like I hear and see ghosts in sounds," he tells his father. By the time he's a college student, Harry's psychic abilities have driven him to booze. After meeting alcoholic Tad Peters, a retired martial arts expert, Harry becomes Tad's surrogate son and student. The two forge a pact to sober up together. Their resolve is tested when Harry agrees to help Kayla Jones, an old childhood crush now a cop, solve her father's murder, which her boss, the local police chief, has dismissed as a suicide. Lansdale's down-home prose erupts with explosive twists and razor sharp insights into how "echoes from the original sounds" can never be silenced until action is taken to defeat the fear that created them. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

The prolific Lansdale returns, after sojourns in pulp, sf, and horror, to work his peculiar mojo on the supernatural crime thriller. Harry Wilkes has inherited his family's curse of experiencing "dark sounds," full-sensory recordings of traumatic events that can be unleashed by, for example, the banging of a toilet lid upon which a guy once blew his brains out. Booze helps hold the "ghosts in the noise" at bay, but his life as a drunken recluse isn't going well. He gets things under control with the help of an eccentric sensei named Tad, but when a boyhood girlfriend named Kayla comes home to find her father's killer, Harold grits his teeth and journeys into the dark once more. Lansdale's prose finds the perfect pitch between the laid-back cadences of front-porch storytelling and the thriller's demand for growing urgency. He is a bit unreconstructed when it comes to gender relations--or at least the vocabulary to describe them--but he's got both the charisma and the balls to pull it off. Funny and scary, with a barn-burner ending. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 341 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307275442
• ISBN-13: 978-0307275448
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in eighteen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror." He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The great Joe R. Lansdale is finally back with another mainstream novel!!!, March 2, 2007

By 

Wayne C. Rogers (Las Vegas, Nevada United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Echoes (Paperback)

The great Texas writer, Joe R. Lansdale, is finally back with another mainstream novel, Lost Echoes, and boy is it a keeper! Though Mr. Lansdale has written other books and collections for the smaller independent presses, he hasn't had a mainstream novel out since Sunset and Sawdust. That was three years ago. I've been like a man in the hot, dry desert with no water to drink, trying to be patient as I eagerly awaited this author's next book. Like Stephen King and Dan Simmons, Joe R. Lansdale can write anything that he sets his mind to--horror, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, Texas noir, and award-winning mainstream novels like The Bottoms and A Fine Dark Line. Mr. Lansdale has been writing fiction for well over twenty years; yet, I've had to come to the hard conclusion that he's America's best-kept secret. That's the only answer I can come up with as to why he hasn't reached the point to where he's now a New York Times #1 best selling author. I've been devouring books for over forty-five years, and The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale is the absolute best novel that I've ever read. No brag, just fact. If you haven't read anything by this writer, then I urge to start with his newest novel, Lost Echoes, which will surely hook you with line and sinker as an absolute "Lansdale" fan. I'll tell you another thing to, this book would make one heck of a fabulous movie. Some of Joe's stuff has already been done by Hollywood--Bubba Ho-Tep and Incident On & Off a Mountain Road.

Lost Echoes is about a young man named Harry Wilkes (think Ashton Kutcher), who's working his way through college and trying to stay out of trouble. You see when Harry was six-years of age, he became sick with the mumps and developed a serious ear infection that affected a part of his brain. After he got better, Harry quickly discovered that if he were in an area where a violent crime had taken place and he heard a sudden sound, images of the past crime would unexpectedly fill his mind and he would see the actual event happen and the faces of everyone involved. In time, Harry found out that he could hardly go anything without this mysterious ability being triggered. When he tried to explain it his few close friends and to his parents, no one believed him except for Kayla, the first girl he ever loved. As he grew older, Harry had to turn to alcohol as a way of putting up a wall against these disturbing images that threatened his sanity. One night while in a bar with one of his childhood friends, Harry sees three guys take this drunk out the back door. He instinctively knows that the guys are going to beat up and rob the drunk and decides to try and stop it. Rushing out into the back alley, Harry witnesses something right out of a movie as the drunk takes on the three strangers in hand-to-hand combat and whips them all in just a matter of seconds. The drunk turns out to be Tad Peters (think of Bruce Willis), a former martial artist who lost his family in a tragic accident. Harry is curious about Tad's skills as a fighter. Recognizing a kindred spirit in the other, they quickly become friends. This eventually leads Harry into becoming Tad's student as they each try to help the other in dealing with his inner demons and drinking problem. It's also about this time that Kayla comes back into Harry's life. Kayla's now a cop, and she wants to find the people who murdered her father. She seeks Harry's help, which causes a whole chain of events to unfold. Harry soon realizes that the men who killed Kayla's father are also connected to other unsolved murders. It isn't long before these men find out about Harry and his special ability and decide to kill him and anyone else who might know their secret. There's going to be one hell of a free-for-all at the end when Harry, Kayla and Tad take on the vicious serial killers in a battle to the death with no mercy being shown by either side.

I stayed up till one o'clock last night to finish Lost Echoes. I'd reached a point to where I just couldn't wait another day to find out the ending. And it was worth it, too! This novel is Joe Lansdale at his best. His writing is smooth and fast paced with an easy Texas colloquial style that makes it seem as if the author is speaking directly to you with his words. The chapters are short with an inevitable hook at the end that makes you want to read just one more before going to bed. That's what caused me to stay up so late last night. The characters are drawn so vividly that they seem like people you've known in your own life with all of their strengths and weaknesses. Joe also knows how to set up the plot so that you're gradually reeled in like a fish at the end of a hook. And, more importantly, the author always delivers with a powerful ending that leaves you wanting to jump up and down like a monkey in a cage. See, I'm already starting to write like Joe! Lost Echoes is FUN with capital letters. It creates a wonderful addiction that makes you want to read more of Joe's novels and short stories. Man, this is what reading is supposed to be--FUN! You never feel cheated with a book by Joe R. Lansdale. Never! This is a writer who always gives his readers their money's worth, plus more. Buy Lost Echoes and treat yourself to an early Christmas present. You won't be disappointed. I can only hope that Hollywood has the good sense to turn this book into a movie.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sense for horror, February 19, 2007

By 

Jules Brenner "~ Critical Mystery Tour" (Hollywood, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Echoes (Paperback)

Joe R. Lansdale takes us into the echoes of evil with a protagonist whose childhood ear infection gives him psychic power he doesn't want. To Harry Wilkes, harsh, explosive images of violence and death linger in the places they occurred -- and he can see and hear them with searingly realistic impact -- private movies in his skull that threaten to madden or demoralize him.

Lansdale does the unusual by taking a mystery down the horrific corridors of ghost-like replays and keeps it destructively alive by upping the threat to his modest hero, to his women, and to his closest friend. A steady sprinkling of humor, an interlacing of lust and romance, an NYPD style of abreviated dialogue, and a visceral sense of foreboding sees us through to a satisfying, high-stakes climax that makes it worth the pain of getting there.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Darkness on the Edge of Sound, August 19, 2007

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Echoes (Paperback)

Attempting a crime thriller with a supernatural twist is risky literary business, but prolific author Joe Lansdale has the chops to pull it off - barely. This is the story of Harry Wilkes, who thanks to a severe childhood ear infection is given the unwanted gift of hindsight triggered by sounds. Put Harry in the vicinity of a violent death and, if triggered by the right sound, an instant replay of whatever gruesome past event took place. Needless to say, neither a pleasant nor desirable talent, which sentences poor Harry to a life of carefully plotted places and activities in an attempt to prevent the next horror show. But after living a life trying to avoid his "sixth sense", Harry must eventually make the choice of confronting his nightmares in order to help Kayla, former crush of his east-Texas childhood and current rookie cop on the local police force - and still a "hottie". While somewhat reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's "Sixth Sense", or more recently, or Tom Piccarilli's bizarre "Headstone City", Lansdale's twist on a second sight is fresh and unique.

"Echoes" starts fast and furious, getting the reader riveted early, but about midway through slows and starts gets a bit muddy. The dialogue is uneven - snappy and darkly humorous at times, dull and uninspired at others. But for me, much of the slowdown can be attributed to Tad Peters, a middle-aged drunk who happens to be a Bruce Lee-class martial artist, independently wealthy, wholly unbelievable, and totally annoying. But we're to believe that the sodden Tad has the mojo to turn Harry's life around, get them both off the sauce, save fair Kayla, and clear her father's good name. But thankfully, just before Tad manages to sink this notable effort, Lansdale recovers and salvages the story with a climax worthy of the crackerjack beginning. All things considered, an off-the-beaten-track-kind of a book that while not without flaws is a worthy read.