House of Echoes is plagued with problems, from a clich\u00e9d plot ripped from X-Files episodes, to an entire lack of action\/plot development to a complete and total non-suspension of disbelief. Couple all of these problems with some rich whiney city people who move to a not-rural Eastern town? (C\u2019mon New York; move to Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, etc., the middle of these states, and then you can start complaining about rural life). It\u2019s a recipe for a boring waste of time.
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\nLet\u2019s start off with the two most glaring issues that everyone can agree make this novel not worth reading. First: nothing happens. Then some more nothing happens. Whine, money, talk, whine, money! talk. Maybe a tad bit of boring back story. Whine. Money. Whine! This sums up the first two-thirds of the book.
\nAs I recount from my experience:<\/p>\n
\u201cAt page 144, I thought something happened. I was wrong. At 186, still nothing.”
\n“Something actually happens around 247. 247 to 384. That’s all there is to the book. The rest is filler.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSecond, the plot is literally taken from one, two, maybe even 10 episodes of the X-Files. Suspicious villagers! Evil villagers! Your children! I\u2019m not going to give it away, but you can see it coming from the beginning. So much foreshadowing I wasn\u2019t even sure why I needed to keep reading. But I did. Alas.<\/p>\n
Third, let\u2019s deal with the suspension of disbelief aspect. I\u2019m a science fiction reader\/fan, as well as a fantasy reader\/fan. I suspend my disbelief lots and lots and lots. I should have no problems doing it, in a coherent and even mildly thought-out world and plot.
\nHouse of Echoes is far from any of those things. Family living in New York, New York sells the tiny apartment, uses their savings and buys a mansion. Or maybe that\u2019s an understatement. This thing they buy had 60 rooms.<\/p>\n60 rooms!<\/p>\n
And they\u2019re going to fix it up. 60 rooms!<\/p>\n
\u201cBen had seen castles a third its size. And while the scale of the place was imposing, its opulence was tempered by its condition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if these people (he\u2019s a two-or-three-time published author and she was a banker) earned some good money in the big city and they bought this place (not on the market for very long) for a song, my disbelief is still broken from the working-over that gave it.<\/p>\n
And they want to renovate it. And this isn\u2019t a spoiler: they do renovate it and they even furnish it. Thank about that. Furnishings, even partial, for a 60-room hotel.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got to be pulling my leg. Oh wait! Brendan Duffy isn\u2019t. It\u2019s just a terribly plotted novel.<\/p>\n
Unless these people secretly inherited a fortune in the tens-of-millions I don\u2019t know about, I don\u2019t believe it for a second.<\/p>\n
Oh yea: they both drive hybrid Ford Escapes. Yea. And they have money to spare. (Give me a break.)<\/p>\n
So then, Duffy harps on this idea that this town, probably 5-10 miles away from the next (a maximum of 20) is rural and isolated. This is in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chief or Armfield might throw the boys a twenty or two at the end of the day, but the cleanup crews practically worked for free. Ben had heard his share of clich\u00e9s about rural living, and everyone one of them had rung in his head in the months he\u2019d spent here, but there was something about watching a small, isolated community like Swannhaven pitch together in a crisis that made him feel as if this was how things were meant to be.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Besides the fact that the writing could use some cleaning up, again, really? Isolated? You\u2019ve seriously got to be kidding me. Then again, maybe Duffy has never left the northeast. I used to live in Elko, Nevada. Two hours (at 80+ mph) from Twin Falls, Idaho. Five hours from Reno, Nevada and four hours from Salt Lake City, Utah.<\/p>\n
That was isolated, as is Winnemucca, or any number of small towns in the western United States. 150-500 miles away is isolated. Ten miles is a damn swan song, although probably not a haven. So no, I don\u2019t believe the premise, I don\u2019t believe what goes on. I don\u2019t believe a single word Duffy rights because it\u2019s so ridiculous.<\/p>\n
As I wrote above, nothing ever happens and when the ending finally does come, one saw it leaps, bounds, miles away. Probably many more miles away than this \u201crural\u201d and \u201cisolated\u201d town is from its neighboring towns, the big cities and even New York itself.<\/p>\n
Stay away from a sloppily plotted and boring novel.<\/p>\n